Book Review - Guantanamo: What the world should know, by Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray

The revelation in 2004 of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has refocused attention on the legal structures and conditions of the indefinite detention of persons in US military custody at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba. Two features are important in this re-focus. In 2003, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo Bay, was sent to Iraq to 'gitmoize ' (ie to apply the Guuantanamo detention management principles) to Abu Ghraib. Secondly, it has become apparent that serious human rights abuses within Us military custody are more properly seen within a context of the ascendancy of asserted US executive power in establishing an extra-legal system of classification and detention, with exceptionialism in that system to international human rights standards.