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The Least Worst Place
by Karen Greenberg
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In January 2002, the first detainees of the War on Terror disembarked in Guantánamo Bay, dazed, bewildered, and--more often than not--alarmingly thin. With little advance notice, the military's preparations for this group of predominantly unimportant ne'er-do-wells were hastily thrown together, but as Karen Greenberg shows, a number of capable and honorable Marine officers tried to create a humane and just detention center. Greenberg, a leading expert on the Bush Administration's policies on terrorism, tells the story of the first one hundred days of Guantánamo through a group of career officers who tried--and ultimately failed--to stymie the Pentagon's desire to implement harsh new policies and bypass the Geneva Conventions.…
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"Greenberg is the director of the Centre on Law and Security at NYU and she’s very critical of the Bush era and all the practical aspects of it, especially detention. She’s done some great work here on Guantanamo and its first 100 days. She tackles it from a legal point of view which is very interesting, what it means and how it is possible, if at all, to get out of this mess. She has good relationships with the army, the justice department and the international community, so she’s very well informed and it’s a good reference on what took place in Guantanamo. She concludes that it was a fully-fledged state-sponsored practice including the enhanced interrogation techniques, i.e. torture. She shares with Obama the view that it needs to be delicately and sensitively dealt with in order for America to recapture the moral high-ground, which it really did lose over this. She believes that Obama should come out and say sorry."