Guantanamo: What the World Should Know [Paperback]

Michael Ratner (Author), Ellen Ray (Author), Anthony Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Series: Politics of the Living | Publication Date: June 30, 2004

In the months following its initial release, Guant¡namo: What the World Should Know has proved to be a disturbingly accurate account of the Bush administration's tangle with civil liberties and torture. Written by Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights President and co-consul on the case of Rasul v. Bush)and Ellen Ray (Institute for Media Analysis President), Guantanamo is the most authoritative documentation to date on President Bush's moves toward a network of detention centers--a system without accountability, which flouts U.S. and international law.
With a resource section that includes the Gonzales memo to President Bush and excerpts from the Geneva Conventions, Guantanamo provides strong evidence of Ratner explains how Gonzales and the Bush Administration are acting to radically alter America's historic commitment to civil and human rights, and why all Americans should resist what is being done in our name.
Gathered together for the first time, Guant¡namo: What the World Should Know includes the governmental memorandum that led to the conditions at the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and beyond.
Ratner and Ray give the definitive account of what led to the current conditions at Guant¡namo and the importance of continuing to fight against the violations of U.S. and international law undertaken by the United States since 9-11. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the rule of law, liberty, democracy--and the right to dissent.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Tis the season...for political nonfiction
Ruminator Review
October 2004
Guantanamo is a profoundly disturbing portrait of the history of the U.S naval station in Cuba and those detained there. Prisoners of war and even civilians, carefully recategorized as "enemy combatants," may be held there indefinitely, on no formal charges and without access to legal counsel or a hearing in court, and even allegedly tortured in hopes of producing intelligence that may improve national security. This small book consists largely of transcripts if interviews with Michael Ratner, an attorney working with the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of the detainees in Guantanamo (some of them held there since 2002). He gives stark information about conditions within the prison as well as the ongoing struggle to give the detainees a fair hearing in court. Much of it is drawn directly from government and court sources. If our government is going to "nuance" its commitment to the Geneva Convention and its protections for prisoners of war, we owe it to each other to make civil liberty concessions deliberately, with informed consent. If we don't bother to look squarely at Guantanamo and the detainees--and the implications for our own basic freedoms the situation entails--we have no one but ourselves to blame for the erosion of those rights. This is a book you must read.

About the Author

Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He serves as co-counsel in Rasul v. Bush, the historic case of Guant¡namo detainees currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Under Ratner's leadership, the Center has aggressively challenged the constitutional and international law violations undertaken by the United States post-9/11, including the constitutionality of indefinite detention and the restrictions on civil liberties as defined by the unfolding terms of a permanent war. In the 1990s Ratner acted as a principal counsel in the successful suit to close the camp for HIV-positive Haitian refugees on Guant¡namo Bay. He has written and consulted extensively on Guant¡namo, the Patriot Act, military tribunals, and civil liberties in the post-9/11 world.
He has also been a lecturer of international human rights litigation at the Yale Law School and the Columbia School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, special Counsel to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to assist in the prosecution of human rights crimes, and radio co-host for the civil rights show Law and Disorder.

Ellen Ray is President of the Institute for Media Analysis and the author and editor of numerous books and magazines on U.S. intelligence and international politics. She is co-editor with William Schaap of Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way and Covert Action: The Root of Terrorism, both published by Ocean Press in 2003.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green (June 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931498644
• ISBN-13: 978-1931498647
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #668,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Ratner is an attorney and the board chair of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is well known for his human rights activism and is the author of numerous books, including The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld (The New Press). He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good account of the USA's concentration camp at Guantanamo, December 16, 2004

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Guantanamo: What the World Should Know (Paperback)

This book consists of interviews of Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, by writer Ellen Ray, plus relevant UN and other documents. Ratner was co-counsel in Rasul v Bush, which the New York Times called "the most important civil rights case in half a century" because on 28 June 2004 the Supreme Court ruled against President Bush that the US military could not hold what it called `enemy combatants' indefinitely, without charge and without access to legal representation. The Court ruled that the prisoners had the right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts.

The Bush government then set up `combatant status review tribunals', supposedly to decide whether the detainees had been correctly designated as enemy combatants and therefore were being rightfully detained according to the laws of combat. However, the administration breached the Supreme Court's ruling that the prisoners had the right to challenge their detentions in civilian courts, since all the tribunals' members are military officers.

Guantanamo is `an interrogation camp', which is flatly illegal, under US and international law. It harks back to Stuart Britain's offshore penal colonies which were beyond the reach of law, forms of executive imprisonment which the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act made illegal. The US detention centres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Diego Garcia and on board US aircraft carriers are modern Devil's Islands.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has reported that US forces had inflicted on the 550 prisoners illegally held at Guantanamo Bay psychological and physical coercion that was `tantamount to torture'. It said, "the construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture." At least three children, between 11 and 13, were held at Guantanamo; some are still there today.

The British state is guilty of collaboration and connivance with these illegal US state actions. British courts, like US courts, are using as evidence statements made under duress and torture in these US-run camps, thereby condoning the use of torture.

29 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The True Story Behind an American Gulag, August 14, 2004

By 

Magna Carta "Caring Human" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guantanamo: What the World Should Know (Paperback)

This book provides a really concise, clear and powerful explanation of the American interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. The author who represents some of the detainees and has interviewed them paints a vivid picture of their hideous treamtment. He demonstrates that the camp is not only outside the law, but a threat to the safety of us all. If you want to know why Guantanamo has become iconic in the Muslism world for everything wrong with the US, read this book.

26 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Torture Island, July 23, 2004

By 

M. S. Smith (NYC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Guantanamo: What the World Should Know (Paperback)

This book puts another nail in Bush's coffin. It exposes the shameful scandal of Guantanamo, America's torture base in Cuba, where over 600 persons from some 40 countries have been held , with no lawyers, no charges, for over two years. Attorney for several of the prisoners and President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, tells the sordid story of torture and secrecy to veteran movement journalist Ellen Ray in a book that is as compelling to read as Michael Moore's movie was to watch.