It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that occasionally, a creature is born with a face that only a mother could love. If we extend this premise to the world of books, it is quite easy to understand and accept that occasionally, a book is published - a book which only a lawyer could adore. Written mostly in legalese, in prose stripped of elegance and charm and the innate splendor of the English language, reading this book was for me an experience akin to having a literary nightmare.

I know that several professional reviewers have written glowing reviews of this book; and the fact that the author is a lawyer has prompted me to write with utmost care and use a great deal of caution, and to think clearly before putting words on paper and, above all, to be fair.

Even though the publisher of this book states emphatically that "Benjamin Wittes offers the first nonpartisan critique of a crucial front in America's war on terror," and several reviewers have praised the author's "refreshingly nonpartisan perspective", it is possible, never the less, to see through the thicket of verbiage and to discern and understand where the author's sympathy lies, and where exactly he stands in the matter of the reprehensible torture and unspeakable horrors that the detainees have endured in Guantanamo Bay prisons: in Dick Chaney's yard, fist-bumping with the Vice President. I was quite shocked to read also that the author believes that many of the administration's nefarious deeds were far more defensible than its critics believed, and that he thinks the unconscionable deeds of the Bush administration, the deeds that shocked even our allies in the UK, France and Germany, actually warranted congressional support!

Mr. Wittes states that terrorism is fundamentally different from all other crimes, since it "involves horrors on an altogether different scale." And he believes that we owe dramatically less judicial protection to nonresident aliens than to U.S. citizens, even if the aliens are held incommunicado, in long-term military detention, without any charges against them. "No society can afford inviolable principles and inflexible rules concerning those steps on which its ultimate fate or interests depend," he states.

This is what he has written regarding his opinion on torture: "The stark reality is that absent an interrogation tactic that "shocks the conscience," Hoess--like his colleague Josef Mengele--might well have escaped justice, Nuremberg lost an important witness, and history denied his crucial accounts of the factory where more than a million people died. If the tactic--and the absence of any judicial review of its use--does not suddenly seem more defensible, you have proven yourself both a principled opponent of abusive interrogation and truly committed to judicial oversight of legally dicey wartime practices."

In his review of this book, Professor CURTIS A. BRADLEY, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, has written(Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2008):"Yet when it comes to the issue of torture, Wittes appears to waver in his approach. He makes clear that he supports the interrogation tactic that the British used in 1946 with the wife of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which they threatened to send her sons to a country where they would likely be killed."

I felt a deep sense of revulsion as I read this book, and then I was quite shocked. Read "Law and The Long War", if you wish, but only after you anaesthetize your conscience.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that occasionally, a creature is born with a face that only a mother could love. If we extend this premise to the world of books, it is quite easy to understand and accept that occasionally, a book is published - a book which only a lawyer could adore. Written mostly in legalese, in prose stripped of elegance and charm and the innate splendor of the English language, reading this book was an experience akin to having a literary nightmare.

I know that several professional reviewers, a few of them non-lawyers, have written glowing reviews of this book; and the fact that the author is a lawyer has prompted me to write with utmost care and use a great deal of caution, and to think clearly before putting words on paper and, above all, to be fair.

Even though the publisher of this book states emphatically that "Benjamin Wittes offers the first nonpartisan critique of a crucial front in America's war on terror," and several reviewers have praised the author's "refreshingly nonpartisan perspective", it is possible, never the less, to see through the thicket of verbiage and to discern and understand where the author's sympathy lies, and where exactly he stands in the matter of the reprehensible torture and unspeakable horrors that the detainees have endured in Guantanamo Bay prisons: in Dick Chaney's yard, fist-bumping with the Vice President. I was quite shocked to read also that the author believes that many of the administration's nefarious deeds were far more defensible than its critics believed, and that he thinks the unconscionable deeds of the Bush administration, the deeds that shocked even our allies in the UK, France and Germany, actually warranted congressional support!

Mr. Wittes states that terrorism is fundamentally different from all other crimes, since it "involves horrors on an altogether different scale." And he believes that we owe dramatically less judicial protection to nonresident aliens than to U.S. citizens, even if the aliens are held incommunicado, in long-term military detention, without any charges against them. "No society can afford inviolable principles and inflexible rules concerning those steps on which its ultimate fate or interests depend," he states.

This is what he has written regarding his opinion on torture: "The stark reality is that absent an interrogation tactic that "shocks the conscience," Hoess--like his colleague Josef Mengele--might well have escaped justice, Nuremberg lost an important witness, and history denied his crucial accounts of the factory where more than a million people died. If the tactic--and the absence of any judicial review of its use--does not suddenly seem more defensible, you have proven yourself both a principled opponent of abusive interrogation and truly committed to judicial oversight of legally dicey wartime practices."

In his review of this book, Professor CURTIS A. BRADLEY, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, has written: "Yet when it comes to the issue of torture, Wittes appears to waver in his approach. He makes clear that he supports the interrogation tactic that the British used in 1946 with the wife of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which they threatened to send her sons to a country where they would likely be killed."

I felt a sense of revulsion as I read the book, and then I was deeply shocked. Read "Law and The Long War", if you wish, but only after you anaesthetize your conscience.

Benjamin Wittes, a former editorial writer for the Washington Post, has written the indispensable book on reforming US policy on detainees at Guantanamo. His exhaustive reading of everything that has been said, by the government, by the detainees themselves uncoerced in open hearings, so to give the best available portrait of the men at Guantanamo today - not those who were there in the first years, but those who are there now - is worth the price of the book. His policy prescriptions are well thought out, moderate, temperate, and are a special call to Congress to stop sniping from the sidelines and actually decide what to do. I do not think that anyone can have a serious opinion about what to do about detainee policy without reading this book.