Bad Men

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.

'A measured and uniquely informed account of systemic brutality and blind folly on an epic scale, of the tragic perversion of America's judicial system, and of the licensing of torture throughout the world by those who imagine themselves opposed to it.' -- John le Carre 'lifts the lid on the hypocrisy and routine abuse of human rights... at the heart of the War on Terror.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'a succinct argument on how the US and UK are continually messing up foreign policy...' THE LIST 'Clive Stafford Smith... breaks his silence to deliver an indictment of the detention centre, which is all the more devastating for being expressed in such temperate terms... this book serves as a warning of how a nation with liberty at the heart of its written constitution is helpless to prevent a determined administration from overriding them.' DAILY MAIL 'a laconic and sardonic first-person account, acutely observed and at times blackly humorous, of what Guantanamo Bay is actually like.' -- Geoffrey Robertson QC NEW STATESMAN 'Stafford Smith's facts and figures are undeniable... BAD MEN glints with absurdity... And it brims with drama and horror.' THE INDEPENDENT 'humane and entertaining... a quintessentially British account mixing wry humour with irony and understatement' THE GUARDIAN 'Stafford Smith writes well and with humour, though the story he tells is shocking.' TLS 'a remarkable and passionate book... Stafford Smith achieves something unprecedented. He lets the facts speak , and the result is riveting.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'The best analysis so far of the erosion of civil liberties in America and Britain and the consequences for individuals and society' THE ECONOMIST

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