Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

Joseph Margulies is a nationally recognized civil rights lawyer and law professor in Chicago. He was the lead attorney in Rasul v. Bush, one of two cases in the Supreme Court that exposed the plight of the Guantánamo prisoners and led to judicial oversight of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He argues that in creating this detention policy, the president has claimed all the power of a wartime executive but rejected all restraints on the use of that power, including those imposed by other branches of government. The result is an unprecedented, and dangerous, expansion of presidential authority. Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power examines the arguments on both sides of the issue, but it makes clear that the present policy is a legal and ethical disaster that offers only a false promise of security against terrorism, even as it inflames sentiments against us in the rest of the world, inspiring far more terror than it could ever prevent.