San Antonio College Library

"According to the Bush administration, the war on terrorism requires new tactics and new thinking--including departure from the Geneva Convention when deemed necessary. Guantanamo shows how that policy is implemented at Camp Delta, how it is vigorously defended in the name of national security, and how it is contested just as passionately on behalf of personal freedom and human rights."--Container.

The movie Zero Dark Thirty portrayed the CIA's controversial "enhanced interrogations"--Widely described as torture-as a key to uncovering information that led to the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with prominent political leaders and CIA insiders, FRONTLINE reveals the many challenges to this version of history. Filmmaker Michael Kirk (United States of Secrets) investigates the agency's...

Reveals the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps from 1890s Cuba to the Philippines and southern Africa in the early twentieth century, to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War. Pitzer discusses their use for civilian relocation and exposing their role as dehumanizing sites for political repression that have claimed millions of lives. --Adapted from publisher description.

It is commonly believed that a state facing a terrorist threat responds with severe legislation that compromises civil liberties in favour of national security. Roger Douglas compares responses to terrorism by five liberal democracies-- the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-- over the past 15 years. He examines each nation's development and implementation of counterterrorism law, specifically in the areas of information...

"Since 9/11, the U.S. government has acted in a variety of ways--some obvious, some nearly invisible--to increase its surveillance and detention power over American citizens and residents. While most of us have made our peace with the various new restrictions on our civil liberties after 9/11, we have done it without really understanding what those restrictions are or the extent of their reach. Moreover, we tend to think that if the national security...

"The modern laws of war that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were developed with a particular concept of war in mind - one that does not apply to the conflict with our current adversaries. With the September 11 attacks the United States found itself engaged in a new kind of war, with new dilemmas that needed new rules. Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution examines three significant enemy combatant cases - Padilla, Hamdi,...

A human rights lawyer who has had independent access to the prisoners at Guantanamo documents the realities of their experiences while citing the near-absurdities that mark their incarceration, from an absence of security at the local airport to the army's order to protect iguanas on the roads.