YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP!

A former defense counsel recounts his years fighting for detainees.

In his nonfiction debut, Berrigan writes about defending the kinds of clients many people would consider indefensible: the Guantanamo prisoners from President George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Berrigan, a former JAG, became a lawyer for the Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he and his colleagues had to deal with the strange no man’s land created by the Bush administration’s serial violations of U.S. and international law, including innumerable barbaric practices and many instances of actual torture. As the title of the book indicates, he manages to infuse much of his account with a kind of grim humor despite the dark scenarios he describes—largely a series of kangaroo-court trials involving parties whose names have long since faded from the headlines and the popular consciousness. Throughout the text, Berrigan includes color photos and sections of actual trial transcripts to lend further grounding to his wild, outrageous tales of government lawyers scrambling on behalf of their clients to combat the Bush administration, which was making up new laws when it wasn’t ignoring existing ones. The author approaches this material with a thoroughly appealing, darkly comedic tone, relating incident after incident in which “the Prosecution was trying to peddle a lot of bullshit.” Berrigan is refreshingly even-handed in his political criticisms: Nothing could equal the evil of an administration green-lighting torture, but, he notes, President Obama’s promise to end the military commissions upon taking office didn’t amount to much, either. “Unfortunately,” the author writes, “almost from its inception, the Obama Administration started to backpedal and compromise in the face of relentless Republican attacks and fearmongering.” Berrigan’s stories feel extra poignant in light of the current administration’s complete disregard for the law.

A gripping behind-the-scenes story of the embattled lawyers trying to defend Gitmo prisoners.