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The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law
By Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz
NYU Press, 2009, 448 pages
$21.75 hardcover, $14.30 Kindle
Denbeaux and Hafetz, who represented some of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, rely on government data and court testimony, as well as interviews with their clients, to present a chronological narrative of the legal maneuvering that took place at Gitmo—which at its peak housed 750 detainees from 40 countries.
The defense lawyers’ biggest battles involved gaining access to their clients in the first place, and establishing the detainees’ right to habeas corpus. The defendants were by and large underlings who didn’t know anything of value about terrorism, according to the authors. (Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called them “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”) Many of them were isolated for years without diversions or outside contact—and worse. Publishers Weekly said, “The desperate words…of Gitmo detainees on torture grab the heart and do not let go.”
Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials
By Kyndra Rotunda
Carolina Academic Press, 2008, 264 pages
$25.60 hardcover
As a member of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor, U.S. Army Captain (now Major) Kyndra Rotunda prepared war crimes charges against suspected al Qaida and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo. Through a series of vignettes, Rotunda analyzes the laws governing the war on terror, the Geneva Conventions, and the policies toward the treatment and rights of detainees held in Cuba. She describes in detail the detention camp, her experiences with detainees and interrogators, and the work of the Criminal Investigation Task Force around the globe to assemble evidence against suspected terrorists.
The author says that the military commissions at Gitmo gave the detainees more legal rights and privileges than the Geneva Conventions require. She asks, “In a war our enemies call a ‘religious war,’ where radical Islamists use their religion to justify brutally beheading innocent civilians, is it smart to exceed the Geneva Conventions?” Rotunda would have you believe the prisoners were not tortured.
In fact, she noted that gentle interrogations techniques and patience were more effective than harsh interrogation methods, which tends to undermine the Bush administration’s justification for using the latter.
The book’s cover shows a hooded jihadist with the Quran in one hand and a hand grenade in the other, in case you were wondering whose side the author is on.
The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror
By Glenn Sulmasy
Oxford University Press (USA), 2009, 256 pages
$21.56 hardcover, $16.47 Kindle
The recent Boumediene v. Bush decision, which upheld the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, promises to throw national security law into chaos, says Glenn Sulmasy, an expert on national security law. His book opens with a history of America’s long and complicated experience with military commissions, and argues for a more sensible approach to the global war on terror’s unique set of prisoners. He proposes creating a separate standing judicial system, overseen by civilian judges, that allows for habeas corpus appeals and which focuses exclusively on existing war-on-terror cases as well as the inevitable cases to come.
See also: Bush, the Detainees, and the Constitution: The Battle over Presidential Power in the War on Terror, By Howard Ball (University Press of Kansas, 2007, 275 pages, $26.56 hardcover).