The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days.
Author | Ghosh, Saurav |
Position | Book review |
The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. By Karen Greenberg, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. $27.95.
Many today consider the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay an international symbol for detainee abuse, foreign policy arrogance and even the erosion of core American values. To explain how this happened, author Karen Greenberg begins at the beginning. In The Least Worst Place, she offers an insightful and troubling portrait of the first hundred days of the detainment operation at Guantanamo Bay. The story provides key insights into how the U.S. military and executive bureaucracy struggled to answer a pressing question of the global war on terror: what to do with "terrorists" captured in the field? As Greenberg competently illustrates, no clear resolution to this issue has emerged, and in the absence of clarity, the forces on the ground muddled blindly through a legal and political void.
As Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and a frequent commentator on the subject of detention and the war on terror, the author is a well-recognized expert able to skillfully retell the Guantanamo story. As she explains in this thoroughly researched history, the development of Guantanamo was guided by many key decisions but almost no overarching strategy. Greenberg suggests that understanding Guantanamo's first hundred days is necessary to understand how this virtually abandoned U.S. Naval base became an international symbol of American foreign policy failings. As she establishes in the preface, the events of this book predate the authorization to use coercive interrogation and the Bush-era "torture memo," as well as the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Greenberg's point is that "these 100 days shed light on later crimes that were ordered and committed at Guantanamo, making us wonder: could those subsequent circumstances have been avoided?" (p. xvi). By the book's conclusion, Greenberg seems to answer this question in the affirmative, and while this is a bold assertion, her skillful ability to connect events at Guantanamo to larger developments in U.S. foreign policy makes the claim credible.
The book begins by describing Guantanamo before the detainment operation swept in. The naval base, a vestige of the Cold War, was barely functional and staffed with a skeleton crew. Its detention center (formally Camp X-Ray) was built in the mid-1990s to prevent a humanitarian crisis...
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