America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the War on Terror

Edited by Rachel Meeropol
Featuring detainee testimonies and analysis by Reed Brody, Barbara Olshansky, Michael Ratner, and Steven Macpherson Watt

America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the "War on Terror" features first person accounts by individuals who have experienced the horrors of executive detention, including former Guantanamo detainees Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal; Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen the United States sent to Syria to be interrogated and tortured for nearly a year; and many other non-citizens who were wrongly swept up in the post-9/11 terrorism investigations. These narratives appear alongside political and legal analysis of the Bush Administration’s controversial post-9/11 detention practices.

The confirmation proceedings for Alberto R. Gonzales and Condoleezza Rice, like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, have triggered a national debate about the U.S. government's controversial treatment of detainees and its practice of torture. At the heart of the debate is the question, "Is the United States undermining democracy, freedom, and human rights in its effort to protect its citizens from terrorism?" The authors of America's Disappeared answer with a resounding "yes."

America's Disappeared describes how the U.S. government, in response to the events of 9/11, launched an unprecedented campaign of racial profiling, detentions, and deportations so grievous as to evoke the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Thousands have been imprisoned without trial or any kind of judicial hearing. Thousands remain indefinitely detained without charges being brought against them. Some are tortured; others are shipped off to other countries to be tortured. This book brings together, for the first time, detainees own testimonies along with analysis by the leading constitutional attorneys and human rights advocates. In addition to a detailed exploration of detention—the forms currently in use, and the conditions of each—the book challenges the Bush administration’s justifications for violating the Geneva Conventions and the most basic definitions of human rights.

RACHEL MEEROPOL is a fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City. BARBARA OLSHANSKY is the Leah Kaplan Distinguished Professor in Human Rights at Stanford University. MICHAEL RATNER is the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.