Democracy Detained exposes the deplorable secret crimes committed by the Bush administration in their war on terror. Prominent legal activist Barbara Olshansky documents the assault on our constitutional democracy since 9/11, meticulously analyzing the unlawful justifications made by the U.S. government for covert actions at home and abroad. She reports on current shocking practices, from the outsourcing of torture through extraordinary rendition, to first-person testimony from innocent men imprisoned without charge at Guantánamo Bay, to revelations of a surveillance network tapped into the homes of average citizens. Democracy Detained is an essential resource for Americans concerned about their civil rights.

BARBARA OLSHANSKY is the Leah Kaplan Distinguished Professor in Human Rights at Stanford University. Previously, she was deputy legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and director counsel of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative there. She was one of the lead attorneys who brought the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that resulted in a decision allowing the nearly 600 detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to challenge their unlawful indefinite detentions. She’s the coauthor most recently of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing George W. Bush from Office (St. Martins, 2006), among other titles, and author of Secret Trials and Executions: Military Tribunals and the Threat to Democracy (Open Media Series/Seven Stories Press, 2002).