Guantnamo - Michael Ratner

Guantnamo: What the World Should Know teams human rights lawyer Michael Ratner with political journalist Ellen Ray to reveal the truth about the Guantnamo Bay Naval Station prison camp and the creation of a new network of U.S. detention centres around the world. The U.S. administration insists that the prisoners within Guantnamo have no rights and can be interogated for as long, and as intensively, as their captors wish.At the end of June 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled against Bush Administration claims that the American military could hold enemy combatants indefinitely, without charge, and without access to legal representation. Guantnamo: What the World Should Know is the most authoritative account to date on President Bush's moves toward a network of detention centres, a system without accountability, which flouts both U.S. and international law. Author Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, was at the centre of this storm as co-counsel on Rasul v. Bush, the historic case of Guantnamo detainees just decided upon by the U.S. Supreme Court.Gathered together for the first time, this book includes the governmental memoranda that created the framework in which the inhuman conditions at Guantnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib could be condoned. It also includes a letter from two recently released British Guantanamo detainees, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal outlining the unchecked brutal treatment and torture which are systemic and widespread in the camp."The chasm between constitutional ideal and actual policy that Guantnamo opens up is one more illustration of the capacity for absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Ratner and Ray at least give us the facts we need to solidify our own stand against the Bush administration's neo-medievalism. Feel outraged, then get active." Anita Roddick, activist, and founder of The Body Shop