Guantanamo
Bay
By Clive Stafford Smith
Clive
Stafford Smith is the 46-year-old human-rights lawyer who has famously
- some would say notoriously - spent more than twenty years in the
United States representing prisoners on Death Row. His clients include
many detainees in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and he established the
London-based charity Reprieve, developed to defending human rights
in 1999. His book is quite simply, devastating, and many will laugh
and cry reading it: laugh in disbelief, and cry in despair at the
utter inhumanity and lack of imagination wrapped up in hypocrisy
so enormous that it beggers understanding. Yet even in the face
of insurmountable odds, Clive Stafford Smith remains an optimist.
Few could maintain his capacity for work and his commitment to his
clients if he allowed frustration or despair to divert him. His
experiences, graphically recounted in this book, have enabled him
to shine a bright, unblinking light into the darkest corners of
illegality that are being justified by governments in the name of
the War on Terror.
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