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Holistic Guidance - Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror
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List Price: $25.95
Our Price: $17.13
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Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 345.7302
EAN: 9781594201790
ISBN: 159420179X
Label: Penguin Press HC, The
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-06-19
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The
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Editorial Reviews:
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Benjamin Wittes offers the first nonpartisan critique of a crucial front in America’s war on terror—the legal battles fought by and among the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court
Six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror. It is losing not to Al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people—its military and executive branch, as well as its citizens—in the midst of a conflict unlike any it has faced in the past. Now, in the twilight of President Bush’s administration, Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes offers a vigorous analysis of the troubling legal legacy of the Bush administration as well as that of the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court. Law and the Long War tells as no book has before the story of how America came to its current impasse in the debate over liberty, human rights, and counterterrorism and draws a road map for how the country and the next president might move forward.
Moving beyond the stale debate between those fixated on the executive branch as the key architect of counterterrorism policy and those who see the judiciary as the essential guarantor of liberty against governmental abuses, Wittes argues that the essential problem is that the Bush administration did not seek—and Congress did not write—new laws to authorize and regulate the tough presidential actions this war would require. In a line of argument that is sure to spark controversy, Wittes reveals an administration whose most significant failure was not that it was too aggressive in the substance of its action, but rather that it tried to shoulder the burden of aggressiveness on its own without seeking the support of other branches of government. Using startling new empirical research on the detainee population at Guantánamo Bay, Wittes avers that many of the administration’s actions were far more defensible than its many critics believed and actually warranted congressional support. Yet by resisting both congressional and judicial involvement in its controversial decisions, the executive branch ironically prevented both of those branches from sharing in the political accountability for necessary actions that challenged traditional American notions of due process and humane treatment.
Boldly offering a new way forward, Wittes concludes that the path toward fairer, more accountable rules for a conflict without end lies in the development of new bodies of law covering detention, interrogation, trial, and surveillance. Sure to discomfort and ignite debate, Law and the Long War is the first nonideological argument about a controversial issue of vital importance to all Americans.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Law and the Long War
Comment: First rate logic. The author has wrapped a very keen mind around a very difficult subject area and produced a highly readable book that is nothing less than a public service.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Read this book, if you wish, but only after you anaesthetize your conscience.
Comment: It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that occasionally, a creature is born with a face that only a mother could love. If we extend this premise to the world of books, it is quite easy to understand and accept that occasionally, a book is published - a book which only a lawyer could adore. Written mostly in legalese, in prose stripped of elegance and charm and the innate splendor of the English language, reading this book was for me an experience akin to having a literary nightmare.
I know that several professional reviewers have written glowing reviews of this book; and the fact that the author is a lawyer has prompted me to write with utmost care and use a great deal of caution, and to think clearly before putting words on paper and, above all, to be fair.
Even though the publisher of this book states emphatically that "Benjamin Wittes offers the first nonpartisan critique of a crucial front in America's war on terror," and several reviewers have praised the author's "refreshingly nonpartisan perspective", it is possible, never the less, to see through the thicket of verbiage and to discern and understand where the author's sympathy lies, and where exactly he stands in the matter of the reprehensible torture and unspeakable horrors that the detainees have endured in Guantanamo Bay prisons: in Dick Chaney's yard, fist-bumping with the Vice President. I was quite shocked to read also that the author believes that many of the administration's nefarious deeds were far more defensible than its critics believed, and that he thinks the unconscionable deeds of the Bush administration, the deeds that shocked even our allies in the UK, France and Germany, actually warranted congressional support!
Mr. Wittes states that terrorism is fundamentally different from all other crimes, since it "involves horrors on an altogether different scale." And he believes that we owe dramatically less judicial protection to nonresident aliens than to U.S. citizens, even if the aliens are held incommunicado, in long-term military detention, without any charges against them. "No society can afford inviolable principles and inflexible rules concerning those steps on which its ultimate fate or interests depend," he states.
This is what he has written regarding his opinion on torture: "The stark reality is that absent an interrogation tactic that "shocks the conscience," Hoess--like his colleague Josef Mengele--might well have escaped justice, Nuremberg lost an important witness, and history denied his crucial accounts of the factory where more than a million people died. If the tactic--and the absence of any judicial review of its use--does not suddenly seem more defensible, you have proven yourself both a principled opponent of abusive interrogation and truly committed to judicial oversight of legally dicey wartime practices."
In his review of this book, Professor CURTIS A. BRADLEY, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, has written(Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2008):"Yet when it comes to the issue of torture, Wittes appears to waver in his approach. He makes clear that he supports the interrogation tactic that the British used in 1946 with the wife of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which they threatened to send her sons to a country where they would likely be killed."
I felt a deep sense of revulsion as I read this book, and then I was quite shocked. Read "Law and The Long War", if you wish, but only after you anaesthetize your conscience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best single book on Guantanamo
Comment: Benjamin Wittes, a former editorial writer for the Washington Post, has written the indispensable book on reforming US policy on detainees at Guantanamo. His exhaustive reading of everything that has been said, by the government, by the detainees themselves uncoerced in open hearings, so to give the best available portrait of the men at Guantanamo today - not those who were there in the first years, but those who are there now - is worth the price of the book. His policy prescriptions are well thought out, moderate, temperate, and are a special call to Congress to stop sniping from the sidelines and actually decide what to do. I do not think that anyone can have a serious opinion about what to do about detainee policy without reading this book.
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