Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials

Honor Bound is an intriguing book that explains the law of war and the inside story of military commissions. The author is a former JAG lawyer who served on the prosecution team, worked in Guantanamo Bay, and was legal advisor to an elite team of war crimes investigators. Through a series of entertaining vignettes, Rotunda discusses and analyzes the laws governing the war on terror, the Geneva Conventions, and the laws related to detainees held in Cuba.

Readers will look at Marine Corps training in Quantico, Virginia; learn about Gitmo's detention camp through the author's experiences with real detainees and real interrogators; travel the globe with "terrorist hunters" following investigatory leads; see what went wrong in Gitmo and with the military commissions; meet Private Jessica Lynch; and learn about laws that protect the combat wounded. Scholarly and informative, this book is also a fascinating and engaging read.


"This eye-opening inside account must be read by everyone who cares about balancing national security and human dignity." - Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard Law School Professor and author of Finding Jefferson

Kyndra Rotunda, a lawyer, is a Major and JAG Officer in the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve, and a leading expert in military law. She has served three tours in the Global War on Terror, including one as a prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions and one in Guantanamo Bay. Rotunda is in private practice and devotes much of her time to advocating for wounded troops and military families. She has represented hundreds of soldiers before their disability boards at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and was the lawyer assigned to Jessica Lynch after Lynch's rescue. Rotunda was recently recruited by the National Veteran's Legal Services Program to produce a series of instructional DVDs about military law, to be published by Lexis Nexis. She is an avid writer and her op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.