Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power.

Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power Joseph Margulies Simon & Schuster www.simonandschuster.com 322 pp., $25

"We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them," President George W. Bush advised in his September 20, 2001, address to a joint session of Congress. If the Camp Delta described in Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power reflects Bush's principles, we should all be grateful that lawyers like Joseph Margulies do not share them.

Margulies, a prominent civil rights attorney and a professor at Northwestern University Law School, was one of the primary attorneys in the Rasul v. Bush litigation. His work in Rasul culminated in the Supreme Court's pronouncement that alien detainees had the right to challenge in U.S. courts the legality of their incarceration. (542 U.S. 466 (2004).)

Guantanamo is a superbly reasoned and painstakingly researched examination of the Bush administration's post-9/11 detention policy. While the majority of Margulies's legal analysis appears to be well founded, his breakdown of the interplay between the prisoner-of-war and civilian Geneva Conventions is overly simplified and arguably incorrect. Specifically, Geneva Convention IV expressly provides that certain individuals are not protected by any of the 1949 conventions, while Margulies maintains that the conventions provide a seamless system of protection for anyone who finds himself or herself in the hands of an enemy.

Still, the work succeeds not only as a fully cited, scholarly assessment of the legality of Bush's detention program, but also as a captivating inside look at Margulies's personal experiences. These include Margulies ultimately seeing his client, Mamdouh Habib, reunited with his wife and children after three long years in American and Egyptian prisons.

Apart from the gripping human-interest story, Margulies addresses some of the more fascinating legal aspects of the tortuous litigation, which spanned about two years. Proceedings began with Margulies and others representing detainees who were not even aware that the litigation existed, and it ended with some of them, including Shafiq Rasul, already having been released.

Margulies writes, "We were not allowed to speak [to] or meet with our clients. We could not even send them a copy of the lawsuit.... Rasul is apparently the first case in more than 150 years in which the subjects of the litigation did not know that a case was underway on their behalf." When he eventually did meet his clients, he had to overcome their suspicions that he was just another interrogator, claiming to be their attorney in a ruse to gather further information.

Camp Delta is the U.S. military's primary detention and interrogation facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The facility houses hundreds of "enemy" captives, including children and the elderly. An in-depth appraisal of the Bush administration's interrogation procedures at Camp Delta forms the centerpiece of the book.

Margulies recounts, in harrowing detail, the treatment that his clients and other detainees were subjected to by their American captors, including a disturbing account of the now-infamous torture and interrogation of Mohamed Al Qahtani. For this reason, Guantanamo is difficult to read at times, and many of the "interrogation" methods described are reminiscent of the reported prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Such examples--together with Margulies's informative summary and analysis of various executive branch and military reports, manuals, memos, and other sources--paint a clear picture of how the administration developed and implemented its detention policy.

Margulies likens Bush's detention and interrogation program to "other wartime misadventures, including the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts during World War I, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War." I think he is being too kind.

Assuming the allegations recounted in Guantanamo are true, it appears that for the first time in our nation's history, high-level executive and military officials could realistically face prosecution for war crimes and, at the very least, international scorn and rebuke for committing human rights violations. I doubt any of the detainees will characterize their experiences at Camp Delta as mere "misadventures."

Guantanamo serves as a searing indictment of President Bush's assertion of unprecedented executive power to detain "enemy combatants," aliens and citizens alike, and his departure from long-standing American values and well-settled principles of international law. Margulies and his cohorts helped begin the restoration process with their victory in Rasul, and that process continues today as our courts examine the administration's detention policies.

Margulies himself best sums up the long-term import of the Guantanamo facility by saying, "When we look back at the crumbling shell of Camp Delta, we will be forced to confront its lasting damage--to the Constitution, to the country, and to the rule of law."

Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER W. CHAPMAN

CHRISTOPHER W. CHAPMAN is a graduate law student at the George Washington University Law School and is completing his thesis on the "unprecedented assertion of presidential national security power" in the war on terror.