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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