Least Worst Place

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.

The latter ultimately won out, replacing transparency with secrecy, military protocol with violations of basic operation procedures, and humane and legal detainee treatment with harsh interrogation methods and torture--patterns of power that would come to dominate the Bush administra.