Guantánamo

In methodical yet impassioned prose, Margulies’s treatise establishes beyond question that America engages in disappearances, indefinite imprisonment and, yes, torture in pursuit of its War on Terror. Margulies was lead counsel in Rasul v. Bush, in which the Supreme Court found that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are entitled to judicial review. Plainly stated: In America, even “enemy combatants” cannot be thrown into permanent limbo. Margulies’s outrage at how the Bush administration has resisted this decision seems to fuel his writing.

Without ever minimizing the enormous injury inflicted by September 11 (or potential future attacks), Margulies’s well-organized chapters reveal to devastating effect how the Bush administration amplifies fears of vulnerability in this supposedly “new war.” The goal, Margulies argues, is to weaken long-established legal precedent regarding treatment of prisoners, habeas corpus, and oversight of military and covert activities (and to absorb these scary new powers into the executive branch). All of the little half-forgotten anecdotes of the War on Terror are here, from innocent British Muslim travelers abused and then ransomed to the military by Afghani warlords, to the CIA’s refusal to produce key planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the 9/11 Commission (perhaps due to his numerous torture sessions?). They form a damning pattern of implication: The official response to September 11 has been unconstitutionally brutal and unacceptably mismanaged.

Above all, Margulies’s cool, thorough prose reveals the lie behind the Bush administration’s manipulation of language and procedure (establishing military commissions without prisoner knowledge or participation) to dodge public curiosity and outrage. Calling this complicated book unsettling is a discreet understatement. To paraphrase Nietzsche, on September 11 all Americans were forced to stare into the abyss, and now Guantánamo Bay is the abyss staring back into us.—Mike Newirth