Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

"Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power" is a powerful and extraordinary book about the Bush Administration's attempt to create a law-free zone at Guantanamo, Cuba, where suspected terrorists can be held outside of judicial scrutiny and tortured for information on al-Qaeda. Anyone who cares about the U.S. Constitution, the law of war, our relationship with the Islamic world, or the successful prosecution of the war on terror should read this book. The revelations of Bush Administration incompetence and criminality are shocking. The book is written from a lawyer's perspective and lays out clearly the history of the Guantanamo prison and the legal battles over the treatment of prisoners there. As the author stresses, the torture tactics have done immense damage to American prestige yet produced little if any valuable intelligence. This failure should not be a surprise, since most of the prisoners are either innocent of terrorist activity or were Taliban small-fry with no connection to September 11 or other attacks on U.S. targets. That hundreds of these pathetic men are still incarcerated speaks volumes about the indecency of the Bush Administration and its inability to admit that it ever makes mistakes. Fortunately, the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate have stepped in to curb the worst abuses and to restore some sanity to our detention policies. They have partially rescued America's good name and commitment to the rule of law. However, until officials of the Bush Administration are put on trial for violations of the War Crimes Act and the Torture Act, the stain on our national honor will not be fully erased.

I applaud Joseph Margulies for his determination and strength in researching to get to the truth. What has been visited upon the inmates of Guantanamo Bay is appalling - I don't care where you're from. Unfortunately this is becoming the norm in the Modern World where the powerful government of this world have put spin on everything and are manipulating the truth for their own gains. I have known Mamdouh Habib and his wife Maha for over a year now. I spent 5 months investigating the theft of a mobile phone from their home during a raid by Australian law enforcement agencies. I revealed a cover-up and a simply strategy - denial. Take it from me, Mamdouh IS innocent. Mamdouh and his wife Maha are two of the most beautiful people I know and, even as an atheist, through them I have come to appreciate - if not love - the Muslim faith and its followers. I am currently aiding them in their fight to regain Mamdouh's passport - a fundamental right, yet something denied because the Australian government is as corrupt and despicable as the US regime. Love to all who read this book, and see truth as the ultimate goal! Regards Roy Barnes http://members.dodo.net.au/senrabyor/

I truly wish this book were fiction, so that I might consider it merely a thought-provoking, witty and beguiling book, as humorous as Joseph Heller's "Catch 22". But alas, this is not fiction. And the reality that this book is not fiction of a perverse, evil and unfair mind, and that it is as true and real as the tiny, crawling, white worms one so often finds in an old bag of rice, actually paralyzed me at moments with fright as I read the book at night, and I felt as if my hair was almost set on fire. The author, Joseph Margulies, is an attorney at Mac Arthur Justice Center, and a law professor at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago. He has been honored with the prestigious Sullivan Award (2005) for the commendable service he did in protecting our civil liberties, and also for challenging the detention policies of the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay. At a time when the members and the chairmen of the relevant oversight committees of both the Congress and the Senate (the House and Senate Judiciary Committee, e.g.) have done nothing to either halt or restrain the blatantly unconstitutional policies (the Supreme Court has now clearly said so) and atrocities of the Bush Whitehouse, it is admirable that the author has strived, often pro bono, to force the Bush White House, in federal courts, to abide by our constitution and also the Geneva Conventions. (The White House has now said that it will abide by the Geneva Conventions!). By striving so courageously to rescue the Guantanamo Bay detainees from a legal Black Hole, he has won the admiration of decent people from around the world, and we should consider ourselves fortunate that we have a man of his caliber and decency living amongst us. Writes Margulies: "The Bush administration claims all the authority that could conceivably flow to the executive branch during a time of armed conflict, but accepts none of the restrictions. The result is unchecked, almost imperial power: the power to define the enemy, to act against this enemy anywhere in the world, to imprison him indefinitely without legal process and under any conditions, and to prevent review of any of these discretionary actions by the courts. All of this power is limited to the president's promise to exercise it wisely. Nowhere is this power, and its abuse, more evident than at Guantanamo Bay." Further, he states: "In the end, the detentions at Guantanamo are important not simply -- and perhaps not even principally- because of the unpardonable treatment the men and boys have been forced to endure, and not simply because of the unprecedented legal position the Administration has taken to defend this state of affairs. Guantanamo is important, as well, because of what it reveals about the Administration's vision of presidential power, and the lengths to which it will go to defend this radical vision." "What distinguishes us from terrorists is our devotion to the rule of law," he has said. He is confident that "sooner or later t

Margulies, counsel for Rasul, a former Guantanamo detainee, gently walks the reader through three plus years of litigations with an obstinate Executive (see Rasul v Bush). An Executive, absolutely certain that their paradigm shift to the "dark side" was necessary and justified by its self declared "War on Terror".* Margulies, in a very readable book, sifts much of the sophistry used by the Executive's lawyers (and supporting sophists) to justify its paradigm shift, concluding: "It is a sad day when competent lawyers who are asked to play this role [of assisting the Bush administration with a conscious desire to evade and circumvent the requirements of the law] agree to do so. If the rule of law is to be silenced during war, lawyers should not be the ones who silence it." However, Margulies retreats from any attempt at comparing the Executive's secret worldwide CIA torture centers with the former Soviet gulags. One can understand this in terms of magnitude. Fortunately, America has not approached the millions harmed or killed or murdered in the old Soviet gulags. But elementally, which Margulies focuses on throughout the book, aren't they the same? In both the gulags and terror centers, governments have authorized or commanded the barbaric and depraved treatment of a human being, resulting in grave harm or serious harm or death, for the purpose of enforcing or justifying or extending their ideology or set of beliefs. I'm grateful to Margulies for writing this book. I'm more grateful that America still has individuals (e.g. Marulies, Ratner, Swift, Katyal et al) and groups that are willing, to immediately shine a light on our government's dark side. In the beginning all they had was a flashlight. Five years later they had a very intense searchlight! * As it turns out our Supreme Court's decision, Hamdan v Rumsfeld, published after Margulies' book, lit up the Executive's "dark side", in a paradigm shifting way. However, it was the antithesis of the Executive's paradigm shift. It has truncated if not ended this Executive's very obstinate and likely criminal foray to the dark side.

Hearing much about the myriad court cases running through the system the past several years in regard to Guantanamo, this book did a great job detailing the Administration's position and laying out the misguidedness of this policy. I found much about the book shocking for many of the truths revealed as to how our Administration has allowed the torture of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo and has encouraged the torture of these people by foreign governments (i.e. Egypt, Pakistan). Margulies does a good job of concisely explaining the history of Guantanamo as well as laying out a very thoughtful and powerful argument against the Administration. He traces back into US military conflicts over the past 50 years to show why the Administration's current policies contradict everything for which our country stands. Most impressive about Margulies' book is the lack of partisan ranting and uncivil discourse heard by other Bush opponents. Margulies succeeds in convincing the reader that from both a Left and Right standpoint the Bush Administration has overstepped its bounds and put our country more at risk, not less.