The Terror Courts

The Terror Courts

Author: Jess Bravin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0300191340

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Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military's prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush's executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the "Wall Street Journal"'s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison's opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice--issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon's prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo--and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground--"The Terror Courts" could not be more timely.


The Challenge

The Challenge

Author: Jonathan Mahler

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2008-08-05

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1429933127

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An inspiring legal thriller set against the backdrop of the war on terror, The Challenge tells the inside story of a historic Supreme Court showdown. At its center are a Navy JAG and a young constitutional law professor who, in the aftermath of 9/11, find themselves defending their nation in the unlikeliest of ways: by suing the president of the United States on behalf of an accused terrorist in order to prevent the American government from breaking the law and violating the Constitution. Jonathan Mahler traces the journey of their client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, from the Yemeni mosque where he was first recruited for jihad in 1998, through his years working as a driver for Osama bin Laden, to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001 and his subsequent transfer to Guantanamo Bay. It was there that Hamdan was designated by President Bush to be tried before a special military tribunal and assigned a military lawyer to represent him, a thirty-five-year-old graduate student of the Naval Academy, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. No one expected Swift to mount much of a defense. Not only were the rules of the tribunals, America's first in more than fifty years, stacked against him, his superiors at the Pentagon were pressuring him to persuade Hamdan to plead guilty. But Swift didn't believe that the tribunals were either legal or fair, so he enlisted a young Georgetown law professor named Neal Katyal to help him sue the Bush administration over their legality. In the spring of 2006, Katyal, who had almost no trial experience, took the case to the Supreme Court and won. The landmark ruling has been called the Court's most important decision ever on presidential power and the rule of law. Written with the cooperation of Swift and Katyal, The Challenge follows the braided stories of Swift's intense, precarious relationship with Hamdan and the unprecedented legal case itself. Combining rich character portraits and courtroom drama reminiscent of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action with sophisticated yet accessible legal analysis, The Challenge is a riveting narrative that illuminates some of the most pressing constitutional questions of the post-9/11 era.


International Law in Domestic Courts

International Law in Domestic Courts

Author: André Nollkaemper

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0198739745

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The Oxford ILDC online database, an online collection of domestic court decisions which apply international law, has been providing scholars with insights for many years. This ILDC Casebook is the perfect companion, introducing key court decisions with brief introductory and connecting texts. An ideal text for practitioners, judged, government officials, as well as for students on international law courses, the ILDC Casebook explains the theories and doctrines underlying the use by domestic courts of international law, and illustrates the key importance of domestic courts in the development of international law.


Yamashita's Ghost

Yamashita's Ghost

Author: Allan A. Ryan

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0700620141

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"I don't blame my executioners. I will pray God bless them. " So said General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan's most accomplished military commander, as he stood on the scaffold in Manila in 1946. His stoic dignity typified the man his U.S. Army defense lawyers had come to deeply respect in the first war crimes trial of World War II. Moments later, he was dead. But had justice been served? Allan A. Ryan reopens the case against Yamashita to illuminate crucial questions and controversies that have surrounded his trial and conviction, but also to deepen our understanding of broader contemporary issues-especially the limits of command accountability. The atrocities of 1944 and 1945 in the Philippines-rape, murder, torture, beheadings, and starvation, the victims often women and children-were horrific. They were committed by Japanese troops as General Douglas MacArthur's army tried to recapture the islands. Yamashita commanded Japan's dispersed and besieged Philippine forces in that final year of the war. But the prosecution conceded that he had neither ordered nor committed these crimes. MacArthur charged him, instead, with the crime-if it was one-of having "failed to control" his troops, and convened a military commission of five American generals, none of them trained in the law. It was the first prosecution in history of a military commander on such a charge. In a turbulent and disturbing trial marked by disregard of the Army's own rules, the generals delivered the verdict they knew MacArthur wanted. Yamashita's lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose controversial decision upheld the conviction over the passionate dissents of two justices who invoked, for the first time in U.S. legal history, the concept of international human rights. Drawing from the tribunal's transcripts, Ryan vividly chronicles this tragic tale and its personalities. His trenchant analysis of the case's lingering question-should a commander be held accountable for the crimes of his troops, even if he has no knowledge of them-has profound implications for all military commanders.


Judicial Activity Concerning Enemy Combatant Detainees

Judicial Activity Concerning Enemy Combatant Detainees

Author: Jennifer Elsea

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2013-06-21

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 9781490495859

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As part of the conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States has captured and detained numerous persons believed to have been part of or associated with enemy forces. Over the years, federal courts have considered a multitude of petitions by or on behalf of suspected belligerents challenging aspects of U.S. detention policy. Although the Supreme Court has issued definitive rulings concerning several legal issues raised in the conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, many others remain unresolved, with some the subject of ongoing litigation.


Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds

Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds

Author: Mark S. Kende

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-03-02

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0521879043

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This book examines the South African Constitutional Court to determine how it has functioned during the nation's transition.


The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

Author: Jack Goldsmith

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2009-03-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 039333533X

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A key advisor to President Bush recounts his political clashes with powerful administration figures when he questioned the choices of his predecessors about the way the war on terror was being conducted, in an account in which he cites historical parallels.


Torture Team

Torture Team

Author: Philippe Sands

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2008-05-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 014191937X

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After 9/11. George W. Bush's administration declared that they were going to have to work through 'the dark side'. And they did: they turned their backs on international law and on America's history of respecting human rights. They wanted only legal advice that made it okay to torture, and they made sure they got it. Voices of dissent were sidelined, while low level officials brainstormed interrogation techniques and took their lead from Jack Bauer in 24. In Torture Team, Philippe Sands tracks down and interviews those responsible, and makes a compelling case that, in an ugly blotch on Americda's recent past, war crimes were committed for which no one has yet been held to account.