The thousands of lawyers of lawfare

Instapundit:

SO I'M READING JACK GOLDSMITH'S NEW BOOK, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, and so far it's quite good. Excerpt:

It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.

As I've said before, this war has been overlawyered, which is not to say it has been well-lawyered. Goldsmith notes that the Defense Department alone has over 10,000 lawyers, not including reservists....

...
There is more. It gives some examples of how lawfare has forced more lawyers into the war making decisions and defending against the next lawfare case on behalf of the useful idiots of the enemy. It has become a negative factor in designing a strategy to defeat the enemy. It looks like an interesting book. It is too bad it needed to be written.

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