Book Details
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
ISBN-10: 014303782X
ISBN-13: 978-0143037828
Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.5 x 8.4 inches
Book Description
Sixty years ago, the United States and Great Britain spearheaded efforts to create a new world order based on international rules. Today these same two nations are leading the charge to abandon many of the global safeguards they once fought to establish. Crisp, impassioned, and hard-hitting, Lawless World is an exposé and an indictment of a catastrophic realignment of the laws that govern international affairs, the book that broke the stories on the “Downing Street memo” and the “White House meeting memo.” It is also a vivid and human account of the reckless way America has reneged on its very founding documents-and a call for us to recognize the role we should be playing to reassert the rule of law, and with it a stable, secure world. BACKCOVER: “In this expert and judicious study, Philippe Sands portrays a frightening image of ‘America unbound,’ self-exempted from the delicate fabric of international law on which human survival rests.”
-Noam Chomsky
“A penetrating and detailed account of the extent to which those who claim to be spreading global values have ridden roughshod over them.”
-The Observer (London)
“Lawless World goes to the very heart of the nature of the international order and its future.”
-The Guardian (London)
About the Authors
Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands, QC (born 17 October 1960) is a British lawyer at Matrix Chambers, and is Professor of International law at University College London. Sands is notable for writing Lawless World (2006), in which he accused US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of conspiring to invade Iraq in violation of international law. His next book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (2008), dealt with the decisions by top US policymakers to use torture in interrogation of suspects in the war on terror.He also was the first to refer to the Bush-Blair memo that contained the claim that Bush wanted to lure Saddam Hussein’s forces to shoot down a UN plane.[2][3] The Guardian reported Sands’s claims about the memo, which stated that Bush had proposed trying to provoke the Iraqis to fire on fighter planes in United Nations colours.
