A place outside the law Forgotten voices from Guantanamo

Law professor Honigsberg is founder of Witness to Guantánamo, an organization dedicated to the collection and preservation of personal stories from Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Between 2009 and 2019, he conducted 158 interviews with people associated with the notorious facility, from the formally incarcerated to guards, interrogators, translators, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and family members of detainees. Those interviews, many of which he presents here, are breathtaking in their depth and staggering in their significance. Framed by his personal insights, Honigsberg's chronicle sensitively portrays those sharing their stories and illuminates what must be considered one of the darkest episodes of American history. As the author exposes in his research, many of those in Guantánamo were essentially bought and paid for by the U.S., which was desperate to find villains in the wake of 9/11. The political determination to hold them regardless of guilt created a quagmire of lawlessness that now has the U.S. tightly held in its grip. The horrors of Guantánamo have been exposed before, as has its legal legitimacy, but Honigsberg's steadfast dedication to speaking with those intimately involved in the base's inner workings takes a step far above other works. Eviscerating, powerful, and monumentally important, A Place Outside the Law must not be ignored.--Colleen Mondor Copyright 2019 Booklist

The founder and director of Witness to Guantnamo shares his research on nearly 20 years of lawlessness there.Since the military prison was founded in 2002, this "detention center for alleged terrorists" has housed inmates who have been held indefinitely without being charged and without legal representation or recourse for enduring extralegal torture. (Most have since been released from custody.) Honigsberg (Univ. of San Francisco School of Law; Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror, 2009, etc.) and a crew of researchers have conducted 158 videotaped interviews (more than 300 hours of film across 20 countries) with detainees; their distraught family members; Guantnamo guards and interrogators from the U.S. military; civilian and military lawyers; and interpreters hired by the federal government to deal with the mixture of languages spoken by those incarcerated. The author presents factual accounts based on the videotaped interviews and wide-ranging supplemental research. Honigsberg combines his impressive research with his persistent advocacy for detainees who clearly played no role in the 9/11 attacks and who almost certainly never posed any threat to American citizens. In easily understood lay terms, the author explains how the George W. Bush administration ignored federal court rulings regarding humane treatment, how Congress furthered the lawlessness, how federal lawyers invented the status of "enemy combatant," and how the Obama administration never observed promises to shut down Guantnamo. Some of the most unforgettable profiles in the narrative focus on detainee Mourad Benchellali, interpreter Rushan Abbas, military defense attorney Matt Diaz, civilian defense lawyer Gita Gutierrez (on the staff of the Center for Constitutional Rights), military guard Brandon Neely, journalist Carol Rosenberg, and Damien Corsetti, the so-called "King of Torture." As presented convincingly by the author, the misconduct by the U.S. government is so egregious that readers with a moral compass could fairly conclude that many individuals have been wrongly incarcerated.A well-documented, hard-hitting, necessary expos. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.