The Guantanamo Files - book reviews

The following review of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison appeared in the January 2008 issue of New Internationalist.
According to recent reports, George Bush is looking for a pretext to close the abomination that is Guantánamo Bay. Together with its lesser-known satellites, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram airbase [...]

This bleak but honest review, by Mike Phipps, appeared in Labour Briefing.
Who are Guantánamo’s detainees? They are generally not al-Qaeda members or other terrorists but aid workers, economic migrants or politically naïve Taliban foot soldiers –- mostly sold to the US by their allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some were known to be innocent of [...]

My thanks to Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program Director at Human Rights Watch, who has described The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison as “An admirable book,” and has recommended it as one of her books of the year in a column for FindLaw.
Thanks also to the Brighton-based [...]

This review, by Henry Blaxland, appears in the December 2007 issue of Socialist Review.
In his state of the union address of 29 January 2002 George Bush had this to say of his country’s international obligations: “America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power [...]

This review, entitled “Show trials and errors,” was written by Stephen Grey, and appears in this week’s New Statesman.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminded us that, for the KGB, modern psychology made the infliction of medieval-style physical torture redundant. Psychological tortures, devised by doctors, were just as painful and effective. As Bisher al-Rawi, just [...]