The Pentagon has enforced strict rules for journalists writing about Guantanamo, making the job of covering the prison difficult. Luckily, a series of books has provided a valuable look at what has taken place inside: Erik Saar’s book, Inside the Wire : A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo, exposed a sordid side of the prison, showing how female interrogators used sex techniques in an effort to elicit information from the prisoners. (As he explained in an interview with me, it didn’t work.)
Karen Greenberg, the executive director of New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security, visited the camp; in her book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, she provided a measured, and fascinating, account of the early days of the prison and chronicled the lives of the men who tried to set up a just system for the prisoners, placing the story of Guantanamo into a larger context.
A book entitled Guantanamo, My Journey by David Hicks (Random House — just out on Kindle) offers an even more intimate look at the place. In January 2002, he was placed in a cell at Guantanamo and spent five years there. A wayward soul, he had become “obsessed with Afghanistan as ‘a romantic last frontier,’ with information gleaned from Lonely Planet,” while he was living in Australia, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported, and he ended up hanging out with the wrong people in Afghanistan in 2001. A Northern Alliance soldier grabbed him and then handed him over to the Americans. His book shows the dreary, everyday life for prisoners at Guantanamo and sheds light on a corner of the world that is largely hidden from view.
Some people in the publishing world have complained. “It appears Random House does think crime pays,” a representative of a publishing house, Strategic Book Group, said, accusing Hicks of lying in his book about his experiences at the prison. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported, Strategic Book Group has its own version of the story: They will soon come out with a book, Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior, by Montgomery Granger, who is a U.S. army reserve major.
