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Bad Men
Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of the charity Reprieve. He has regularly travelled to Guantanamo Bay to visit and represent some of those held there.

This book describes the prison, the conditions in which prisoners are held there and tells the stories of some of them, including a description of the proceedings at a "military tribunal".

The conditions of Stafford Smith's work at Guantanamo have prevented him from reporting much of what he knows, but what he has written is a terrible story of torture and misery, and the frightening self-belief of those in charge of the system who think they know that the people they are holding are guilty "Bad Men".

Stafford Smith points out that Guantanamo Bay is only the visible tip of an iceberg of underground secret prisons being run by the Americans all over the world.

One of the most telling stories in the book is that of Sean Baker, a Kentucky National Guardsman, who volunteered to play the part of a prisoner in an exercise in which other troops would go into a cell and "extract" him. The other participants did not know that the cell they were entering contained a colleague. Baker was beated so severely that he suffered brain damage and was discharged from the military as a result.
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