Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 4, August–September 2009, pp. 159–166
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The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days
Karen J. Greenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. $27.95/£16.99. 288 pp.
Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials
Kyndra Miller Rotunda. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008. $29.95. 282 pp.
In her recent article ‘Closing Guantanamo: Is Europe Ready?’, Sibylle Scheipers urged Europeans to ‘rethink their own approach to detention’ so that ‘standards for security detention [can be] … clarified’. Her contention that Europe and the United States should try to formalise and extend a system of ‘preventive’ detention of terrorist suspects without charge or trial evokes a reaction of ‘why?’. Why on earth would governments, especially in the US and UK, want to put themselves through further grief given the barrage of domestic and international criticism since 11 September 2001 of the regimes of illegal detention and torture, including through proxies? This reaction is reinforced by two fascinating books, Karen Greenberg’s The Least Worst Place and Kyndra Miller Rotunda’s Honor Bound, which add to the catalogue of books on Guantanamo and the rights and wrongs of the ‘war on terror’ from radically different perspectives.
Greenberg, executive director at New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security, is concerned with how America ‘lost its moral bearings’ in the wake of the 11 September outrage by abandoning the rule of law through rejecting the applicability of habeas corpus, criminal law protections such as rules of evidence, the Geneva Conventions, customary international law, US military law and the UN Torture Convention. Lawyer and academic Philippe Sands has documented in Lawless World the assault by US President George W. Bush and his all-too-willing collaborator UK Prime Minister Tony Blair on this global legal order, and in Torture Team more specifically the Bush administration’s casting aside of the ban on torture. Greenberg makes a powerful case for the damage this abandonment of law did to the world, the United States and the pursuit of terrorists.
As a Liberal, a liberal and a qualified if non-practising lawyer, I cleave to the belief that true security, as well as freedom, can only be delivered through observance of domestic and international law, and fundamental rights. As a member of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice & Home Affairs Committee over the last decade, I have been heavily involved in the attempt by European parliamentarians, lawyers and activists to oppose illegal rendition and torture and expose our own governments’ collusion in them.
So it will be no surprise that my jaw dropped at the contrasting reproach of Rotunda, a military lawyer from the US Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), that the Bush administration gave ‘detainees more rights than the Geneva Convention requires’. Her conclusion is that ‘we soldiers are, and ever will be, honor bound to defend freedom’ (emphasis added), citing the (in)famous slogan coined by Major-General Geoffrey Miller (Guantanamo commander from November 2002 to August 2003, and later of Abu Ghraib), and used with irony in the title of the 2004 book and play by Victoria…
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Sarah Ludford is Liberal Democrat MEP for London and LibDem European Civil Liberties, Justice & Home Affairs spokeswoman. She is also a member in a personal capacity of the councils of Liberty and of Justice and a patron of Fair Trials International, but does not speak for those organisations.
Related Articles
What the Torture Memos Tell Us by Karen J. Greenberg (June–July 2009)
Europe, Guantanamo and the ‘War on Terror’: An Exchange by Nigel Inkster, Robert Whalley, Matthew C. Waxman and Sibylle Scheipers (June–July 2009)
Closing Guantanamo: Is Europe Ready? by Sibylle Scheipers (February–March 2009)
Torture and Incompetence in the ‘War on Terror’ by Adam Roberts (Spring 2007)
Iraq, Liberal Wars and Illiberal Containment by Lawrence Freedman (Winter 2006–07)
Counter-terrorism, Armed Force and the Laws of War by Adam Roberts (Spring 2002)
