BuzzFlash Reviews

December, 2004

"Guantanamo: What the World Should Know"
by Michael Ratner, Ellen Ray

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Even many BuzzFlash readers have had difficulty about where to put "Guantanamo" in the constellation of Bush Administration horrors.

But this insightful book, "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know," can straighten all that out for you. Whether Guantanamo set the precedent for torture at Abu Ghraib or vice versa is largely irrelevant to the fact that more than half the voters in the United States have (at least according to official tabulations) elected an administration that sanctions torture and the abandonment of the Geneva conventions. As "Guantanamo" proves, the American policy of officially sanctioning barbaric behavior was not due to some sort of "misunderstanding." Bush approved it.

Not only is Bush's comfort level with torture and abuse morally repugnant to a civilized democracy, it puts our soldiers at grave risk when they are captured, because we cannot apply horrifying standards of behavior to our enemies (and individuals just "accidentally" sent to Guantanamo) -- and then ask "the enemy" to behave themselves according to international protocols that we have abandoned.

As with most Bush Administration actions, as best as can be detected, Guantanamo has produced precious little information, while turning the United States into a nation that condones prisoner torture, killings, psychological abuse, and to the violation of international legal process to which this nation officially adhered through countless wars, including Vietnam, until this one.

This book explains everything from the political oddity of how the United States came to "lease" 45 square miles of land on the island of Cuba in 1901 as a result of America's role in the Spanish-American War. The Bush Administration used this historical "loophole" to claim that U.S. laws don't have to be observed on Guantanamo because it's on Cuban soil and not under U.S. sovereignty. Boy, that's some Catch, that Catch-22.

Indeed, with documented legal "authorization" by our Attorney General-elect Gonzales, the abandonment of the Geneva Convention protocols were approved. (Gonzales's chilling 2002 memorandum to Bush is included in the appendix of the book.)

And thus, the United States of America officially became a rogue state in the civilized world of nations.

This book, with an introduction by former New York Times legal analyst and guardian of the Constitution, Anthony Lewis, is written as an easy-to-read primer to the vital issues of international law, Constitutional violations, the threat to OUR civil liberties -- and the basic reversion to Torquemada behavior in OUR name -- that have occurred at Guantanamo.

Released in the autumn, this paperback will convince you why Guantanamo is not just a political oddity -- an American plot of land on a Communist island. Under the Bush administration, it has become a key step in the dismantling of our Constitution and the creation of a state that asserts it is above the law of civilized behavior. Unfortunately for us and the world, that rogue state is OUR nation, which has abandoned both international agreements on human rights in war and its moral authority.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS