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Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power by Joseph Margulies

2010; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: s1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1555-2934.2010.01070.x

1555-2934

Susan F. Hirsch,

Empathy and Medical Education

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology ReviewVolume 33, Issue s1 p. 122-125 Full Access Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power by Joseph Margulies Susan F. Hirsch, Susan F. Hirsch George Mason UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Susan F. Hirsch, Susan F. Hirsch George Mason UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 May 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2010.01070.xAboutReferencesRelatedInformationPDFPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessClose modalShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power Joseph Margulies ( New York : Simon and Schuster , 2006 ) Joseph Margulies plunges readers into worlds that are, by his account, "Kafka-esque" or like something from Alice in Wonderland. Yet these well-worn literary allusions fall short of capturing the profound injustice and absurdity that ensued when the US government turned Guantánamo Bay into camps for detaining and interrogating individuals captured in the post-9/11 "war on terror" and, especially, when it repeatedly defended this action in court. Writing for a general audience from the perspective of a defense attorney and the position of a law school professor, Margulies documents well the legal face-down engaged in by the government and those critics of Guantánamo who railed against its breach of national and international laws. At the same time Margulies displays an anthropologist's sensitivity to the details of daily existence that made Guantánamo a worldwide symbol of American injustice and a living hell of "debility, dependence, and dread" for detainees (p. 29). As Margulies describes, strict and unquestionable hierarchy, physical isolation and assault, and a variety of mental tortures were deployed to convince most detainees that they were less than human and possessed no right to argue otherwise. Most of Margulies' book focuses on the development of case law regarding the status and rights of Guantánamo detainees. Margulies writes with clarity and strong conviction about the strategy he and other attorneys used to counter Bush administration insistence that the detainees were "enemy combatants" with no rights in US courts. In offering an insider's review of familiar cases, such as Rasul, Hamdi, and Hamdan, Margulies perceptively analyzes not only the starkly opposing sides but also the divisions among judges who confronted new legal questions in a politically charged era. The strongest criticism is lodged against Bush administration lawyers for their refusal to yield any ground. When decisions went against them, they used different legal tactics to revisit the same issue or simply ignored the ruling. They would release or reclassify a detainee rather than produce him in court. Detailed examples of the government's evasive and deceptive strategies illuminate the contours of a bizarre world where defense attorneys are repeatedly stunned at the government's brazen non-compliance with the rule of law. Moreover, these details convincingly establish Margulies' overarching argument that the Bush administration's creation of Guantánamo as a "world beyond law" constituted the abuse of presidential power. Readers will be more than ready for some answers when they reach the book's penultimate chapter titled "Asking Why." However, Margulies' two-pronged explanation won't satisfy most social scientists. He argues first that the nature of war itself, rather than any particular political ideology, led to the abuses at Guantánamo. The "fog of war" explanation equates losing one's moral compass during war to a pilot losing his or her orientation during a turbulent flight. This rather unconvincing analogy has the further entailment that "pilot error" in such unavoidable situations rarely demands accountability. The second prong offers the less abstract explanation that Bush administration officials believed in a "unified executive" and thus considered themselves empowered to implement policies that would be above question. Some anthropologists might be more interested in a broader explanation that links Bush administration actions to larger geopolitical circumstances and strategies. Others might want more insight into the motivation of those who designed, implemented, and countenanced the horrific world of Guantánamo and the idiosyncratic legal world that shielded it. Tell-all accounts by Bush administration officials have been largely self-serving, and accounts by social scientists hold the promise of revealing more about how power operated (Wedel 2009). Woven throughout the book is Margulies' first-person account of his involvement in Rasul v. Bush, one of the key legal cases. Through this insider narrative readers experience the drama of a case unfolding to a decision. With habeas as the core legal issue, the very humanity of particular people hangs in the balance and thus heightens the dramatic tension. Readers will share Margulies' frustration and outrage at the shifting and underhanded tactics of the Bush administration. Margulies' decision not to reveal a wider range of his subjective responses means that readers never learn why he jumped so whole-heartedly into Guantánamo litigation. Similarly, more attention to the other attorneys working on these cases could have revealed not only their motivations but also the professional and political networks that were built through this effort to counter injustice. Arguably, interviews with key actors lay beyond the scope of the book, yet the lack of mention of the military defense counsel who risked their careers to make arguments similar to those of Margulies and his civilian colleagues was a conspicuous omission. To be fair, nothing in the volume suggests that Margulies intended to write a book about the motivations that can lead one person to abuse power and another to cry out for justice, and to his credit he does not aggrandize his own important and admirable role. Rather, Margulies' presence in the book accomplishes something more powerful. By placing himself among the putative "worst of the worst" and describing his reactions to the extraordinary legal, emotional, and physical worlds they inhabited, he humanizes his client and other detainees. His subjective responses to their deplorable living conditions and debilitated psychological states as well as his accounts of their displays of humanity – tears at the mention of family members, frustration at the irrational behavior of those in power over them – chip away at the dehumanization the Bush administration so effectively instituted. Vivid ethnographic depictions of law's role in institutionalized dehumanization are not pretty, but they are an invaluable record of worlds hard to imagine (see, e.g., Hajjar 2005). As more details of Guantánamo's toxic culture emerge, Margulies' account takes an important place between early bare bones exposés (Rose 2004) and more recent attempts to document the tensions and disagreements among those charged with running the camp and the resulting shifts in detainee treatment (Greenberg 2009). Ethnographers reading back through this history will appreciate the challenges to conducting basic social science faced by those authors who have tried to illuminate the world of Guantánamo, which was, for a time, a very closely guarded American secret (and a dirty one at that). Ethnographers might also wonder, as I did, about the ethical guidelines that Margulies followed in researching and writing from such an unusual context and position. How, for instance, did he square his role as a writer with lawyer client privilege? How did he handle gaining consent from those he later quoted? Did he feel an ethical commitment, as an anthropologist might, to try to represent multiple perspectives in his account? Much as I wanted to learn the answers to these questions from his text, Margulies' lack of overt reflection on such issues is not surprising to me. My own monograph, written from the position of a participant in a 2001 terror case as a result of surviving the bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania in 1998 (Hirsch 2006), offers little discussion of my methodological choices or my approach to research ethics, which I assumed were topics of interest primarily to academic colleagues. An article subsequently published in PoLAR addresses these issues (Hirsch 2007). My determination to reach a broad audience with my story of the abuse of power by the US government, an objective that also motivated Joe Margulies, shaped the topics we included and the styles in which we wrote. Neither of our texts is easily pinned into a genre, but rather each reads like a mixture of ethnography, analysis of law, political commentary, legal thriller, and memoir. Moreover, the extraordinary situations in which we found ourselves likely played a role in pushing us into the risky act of venturing beyond discipline-specific models of sociolegal or anthropological analysis and writing. Margulies is to be commended for pulling no punches in describing and denouncing the techniques of dehumanization at Guantánamo's core. References Cited Greenberg, Karen 2009 The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Hajjar, Lisa 2005 Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley : University of California Press. Hirsch, Susan F. 2009 Deploying Law as a Weapon: Vengeance, Social Death, and Injustice in America's War on Terror. In The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It. H. Gusterson and C. Besteman, eds. Pp. 292– 313. Berkeley : University of California Press. Hirsch, Susan F. 2007 Writing Ethnography after Tragedy: Toward Therapeutic Transformations. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 30 (1): 151– 179. Hirsch, Susan F. 2006 In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief, and a Victim's Quest for Justice. Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press. Rose, David 2004 Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights. New York : The New Press. Wedel, Janine R. 2009 Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York : Basic Books. Volume33, Issues1May 2010Pages 122-125 ReferencesRelatedInformation RecommendedA Bully in the Presidential Bully PulpitAdam Hodges, Anthropology NewsThe Sociodrama of Presidential Politics: Rhetoric, Ritual, and Power in the Era of TeledemocracyJames R. McLeod, American AnthropologistConcha Delgado-Gaitán Presidential Fellows Put CAE's Mission into PracticePatricia D. López, Cathy Amanti, Anthropology NewsOn Discourse and Power: "Cults" and "Orientals" in FijiMartha Kaplan, John Kelly, American Ethnologist