Cover image for The challenge : Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the fight over presidential power
The challenge : Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the fight over presidential power
Title:
The challenge : Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the fight over presidential power
Personal Author:
ISBN:
9780374223205
Publication Information:
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2008]

©2008
Physical Description:
334 pages ; 24 cm.
General Note:
"Portions of this work originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the June 13, 2004, January 8, 2006, and July 9, 2006, issues of The New York Times Magazine"--T.p. verso.
Contents:
The JAG -- The trials -- VUCA -- The professor -- The civil power -- A drowning man -- The lawsuit -- Tugging the lion's tail -- "Oh, I doubt that seriously, Sir" -- "Judge assigned: we won the lottery" -- An indefinite recess -- "We're going to crush you" -- Who we are -- The Supreme Court responds -- Getting to five -- Where's the food? -- The countdown -- The argument -- The heroes of Guantanamo?
Abstract:
In November 2001, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni man, was captured near the border with Pakistan and turned over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. After he had confessed to being Osama bin Laden's driver, Hamdan was transferred to Guantánamo Bay, and he was soon designated by President Bush for trial before a special military tribunal. The Pentagon assigned a military defense lawyer to represent him, a boyish-looking thirty-five-year-old graduate of the Naval Academy, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. No one expected Swift to mount much of a defense. The rules of the tribunals, America's first in more than fifty years, were stacked against him--and that is assuming that his superiors didn't expect him to throw the game altogether. Instead, Swift enlisted the help of a young constitutional law professor at Georgetown, Neal Katyal, to help him sue the Bush administration over the legality of the tribunals. In the spring of 2006, Katyal argued the case, Hamdan volume Rumsfeld, before the Supreme Court and won. Written with the full cooperation of Swift and Katyal, Hamdan volume Rumsfeld is the inside story of this seminal case, perhaps the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law in the history of the Supreme Court.--From publisher description.