HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

Now that the Bush administration is belatedly seeking ways to combat international terrorism within the bounds of national and international law, because of the Supreme Court’s rejection of its current approach, the question arises: How did we come to stray so far from our historic roots in justice and fair play?

How did our present government come to claim justification for not only tribunals for suspected terrorists but also the use of torture in interrogation, indefinite detention without charge or trial, shipping prisoners abroad for interrogation in countries where torture is routine?

A detailed account of this transformation has come out in a report by Jane Mayer in the July 3 New Yorker magazine.

The evidence points to a small group of bureaucrats centered on the office of Dick Cheney, who has made himself the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history. Ms. Mayer makes a persuasive case that Mr. Cheney and longtime colleagues, notably David S. Addington, his legal adviser for 20 years and now his chief of staff, have maneuvered through three administrations expanding presidential power at the expense of Congress and the courts.

She traces their focus on extending executive power back to a belief that the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War (which they think could have been won) resulted in congressional encroachment on the wartime powers of the president.

Mr. Cheney himself, in an interview last December, called attention to a 1987 report that he commissioned as the ranking Republican on a House select committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal. It defended the Reagan administration’s bypassing a congressional prohibition by selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to support anti-communist insurgents in Nicaragua.

Mr. Addington, already a Cheney adviser, contributed legal research for the report. The team shifted into high gear when George W. Bush became president and responded to its drive to expand the powers of the presidency.

Together, wrote Ms. Mayer, they merged the vice president’s office into the presidency. She reported that Mr. Addington regularly attended White House legal meetings with the CIA and the National Security Council and set up a system that routed most national security documents to the vice president’s office.

The team arranged, largely in secret, for the drafting of a series of memos that interpreted the “inherent” wartime powers of the president as commander in chief to justify secret military tribunals and torture, “rendition,” and indefinite detention of detainees. One of the memos called the Geneva Conventions “obsolete,” “quaint” and irrelevant to the war on terror.

The nation’s highest court has now turned back this drive toward an all-powerful executive. As a result, the administration has acknowledged that it must follow the Geneva Conventions and is working with Congress on a way to try detainees. It is a small step in the return to America’s historic constitutional roots.