A well-documented, hard-hitting, necessary exposé.
The founder and director of Witness to Guantánamo 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; Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo. 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 exposé.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2698-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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