cover image The Least Worst Place: Guantnamo's First 100 Days

The Least Worst Place: Guantnamo's First 100 Days

Karen Greenberg, . . Oxford Univ., $27.95 (260pp) ISBN 978-0-19-537188-8

This study of values corrupted by the war on terror examines how the Guantánamo Bay detainee camp declined from a relatively enlightened place to a symbol of American brutality. Legal scholar Greenberg (Terrorist Trial Report Card ) covers the period from December 2001 through March 2002, when Camp X-Ray opened to house suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives captured in Afghanistan. The story's hero is X-Ray's first commander, Marine Gen. Michael Lehnert, who scrupulously observed the Geneva Conventions; he emerges as an almost saintly figure as he tearfully pleads with detainees to end a hunger strike. The villains are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush administration lawyers, led by John Yoo, who advanced specious rationales for stripping detainees of legal protections that would ban harsh and abusive treatment. Greenberg's account is not an exposé of Guantánamo horrors; instead, she draws a lesson on “the banality of goodness”—that dutiful adherence to international law, not personal integrity, is the ultimate guarantor of humane policy. Unfortunately, her story's restricted scope and its celebration of Lehnert's personal integrity blur her focus on the legal and institutional determinants of good and evil. (May)