Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 6/5/2007
“I’m just talking about the law”: Guantánamo and the Lawyers
May 2007
Abstract
“Because the legal advice was we could do what we wanted to them there” (22). This is how a top-level Pentagon official, in David Rose’s Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights, explains why detainees held by the United States have been detained at Guantanamo Bay. It is just one illustration of the important role that lawyers have played in the “War on Terror”—a role, along with factors that have or that may have influenced it, that forms the topic of this essay.
