Customer Reviews

Guantanamo: The War On Human Rights

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David Rose's book is an excellent overview of what is wrong with Bush's "War on Terror" and the methodology used to extract information from those being held at GitMo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other prisons around the world. Through the tortured legal reasoning of the Bybee memo and subsequent twisting by John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales at the behest of Bush, we as a nation have come to the "legal black hole" of GitMo.

Mr. Rose's book shows with painful clarity the results of that kind of reasoning which is illegal and immoral on both the strategic and tactical levels. On the international level the moral and legal high ground that the United States has claimed for the previous two centuries has been wiped away due to the non-legal aborgation of treaties, conventions, and accords that the United States has signed on to and ratified by the sole decisions by one man, Bush. On the national level the legal reasoning for torture is in contravention of U.S. statutory law and ratified treaties that have the force of U.S. law. This is one of the main reasons why Bush and his officials have been twisting the both the seperation of powers doctrine in the Constitution and "war powers" acts by Congress to mean that the office of President has virtually "unlimited power" during war.

The result of this decision to use torture in contravention of both national and international law is made abundantly clear by the horrific cases in Mr. Rose's book and by the experts cited to conclude that torture methodology leads to faulty intelligence, which was the raison d'etat by Bush.

The previous reviewer has obviously not even read Mr. Rose's book because Mr. Rose lives in Great Britain.

The quality of the book was good. I ordered 2 copies and was only sent one. I e-mailed the sender and they quickly sent a second one however this should not have had to happen.

This is an excellent book. It's well-written, and well researched. It's a slim book but packed with information; slim enough to make you feel you can press it onto ,friends and family and insist they read it. I seriously considered buying several copies of it to give away such is the importance of its message. Highly recommended.

This book is based primarily on interviews with British detainees who were captured in Afghanistan and handed over to American soldiers by the Northern Alliance as well as interviews with United States government officials that carried out the treatment of the detainees and there ways of obtaining classified information from these so-called "terrorists".

Throughout his book, Rose argues that the unclear detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has harmed the United States so-called "war on terror" by abandoning the principles of human rights that the United States claims to honor. On February 7, 2002 President Bush declared that prisoners held at Camp X-Ray had no legal status under the Geneva Conventions and that they were not prisoners of war but were "enemy combatants." Only a few of the detainees were involved with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban even though these detainees were rounded up in masses and those who were sold to the United States in exchange for $5,000 bounties paid by the United States for "terrorists" in Afghanistan.

Rose uncovers that the intelligence coming out of Guantanamo has been of little use to the United States government in its "war on terror." The United States has obtained this information through stepping up interrogations and conducting them using beatings, sleep depravation, denial of food, and other harsh techniques in order to force detainees into confessing. Rose's interviews with detainees expose many abuses used during the interrogation process while interviews with US officials try to deny any of it even happened.

David Rose's depiction of what it was like as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay is truly captivating. He precisely describes every detail of the harsh and brutal living conditions the prisoners (most of whom were not even involved with the 9/11 attacks) had to endure. It is remarkable that prisoners even made it out of Gitmo alive since these prisons were transformed more into concentration camps reminiscent of the Nazis. After reading this book, it is hard to imagine that a country that stands for freedom and the American way could subject innocent people to cruel forms of torture simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is disgusting how prisoners were treated and even more disgusting in the way our own president allowed it to happen. It makes one wonder at how truly fair and democratic this country is if places like the prisons at Guantanamo Bay exist.