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Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power
Joseph Margulies
Margulies's clear explications of intricate legal points move his narrative effortlessly from the signing of the Geneva Conventions through the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, to the myriad cases of the detainees in Guantanamo. - Publishers Weekly
Simon and Schuster
July 2006
336 pages ISBN: 0743286855 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Political
After September 11, the Bush administration developed a
detention policy unique in our nation's history. Prisoners
have been taken from every corner of the globe, some of them
arrested thousands of miles from any battlefield, and
shipped to offshore prisons run by the CIA or Department of
Defense. Nearly five hundred prisoners are currently held at
the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, in Cuba, some of whom have
been in prison for more than four years. Another five
hundred are held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Perhaps as many as two hundred others have been sent to
countries with richly deserved reputations for torture, a
process known as "extraordinary rendition." Still more are
held at so-called black sites-CIA-run facilities so secret
the Administration does not even acknowledge their
existence. At these "prisons beyond the law," the
Administration claims the right to hold people indefinitely,
incommunicado and in solitary confinement, without charges
or access to counsel, and without the benefit of the Geneva
Conventions. Worse, the Administration has subjected them to
interrogation techniques that Margulies argues are abusive,
illegal, and immoral. Weaving together firsthand accounts of
military personnel who witnessed the interrogations with the
words of the prisoners themselves, Margulies exposes the
chilling reality of Guantanamo Bay. He examines the genesis
of the detention policy and exposes its consequences, not
only for the prisoners who endure the torment of their
captors but for the larger "war on terror" that is the
centerpiece of the nation's foreign policy.
Joseph Margulies is a nationally recognized civil rights
lawyer and law professor in Chicago. He was the lead
attorney in Rasul v. Bush, one of two cases in the
Supreme Court that exposed the plight of the Guantanamo
prisoners and led to judicial oversight of the prison at
Guantanamo Bay. He argues that in creating this detention
policy, the president has claimed all the power of a wartime
executive but rejected all restraints on the use of that
power, including those imposed by other branches of
government. The result is an unprecedented, and dangerous,
expansion of presidential authority. Guantanamo and the
Abuse of Presidential Power examines the arguments on
both sides of the issue, but it makes clear that the present
policy is a legal and ethical disaster that offers only a
false promise of security against terrorism, even as it
inflames sentiments against us in the rest of the world,
inspiring far more terror than it could ever prevent.
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