The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power
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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... The New York Times - Jonathan Turley With an engaging writing style and eye to detail, Mr. Mahler…takes the reader through Mr. Hamdan's evolution from a street urchin to one of a handful of "high value" enemy combatants…The Challenge is not just a very readable account of an important case. It is also an intimate account of the lawyers who overcame personal conflicts, animus and flaws to produce a decision for the ages. It is an intriguing tale of how a unique convergence of personalities propelled an unlikely dabab driver from Yemen to international prominence.
