Obama’s Guantánamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison

These searing essays on the “enduring prison” make an impressive follow-up to The Guantánamo Lawyers, an earlier collection coedited by Hafetz, a Seton Hall associate law professor. All of the contributors are lawyers who have represented Guantánamo Bay detainees, and they provide an insider look into a “legal black hole” where, they argue, the rule of law is suspended. Recounting stories of human rights violations inside the prison, the essays excoriate President Obama for his failure to close Guantánamo as promised. In their respective essays, Gary A. Isaac, Mark Fleming, and Omar Farah examine the landmark case Boumediene v. Bush, in which habeas corpus was restored for prisoners, to no avail. Other essayists boldly defend their clients’ rights to urgent medical assistance, safe expatriation after release, and the fair disclosure of classified records. Refuting the common perception of Guantánamo detainees as being, without exception, remorseless terrorists, these essays reveal the human side of prisoners who were often abducted under shaky pretexts and detained indefinitely to await trial. This book, from a legal perspective, looks deeply and insightfully into an American institution working in secret in the age of the War on Terror.[em] (July) [/em]