The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days by Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security, was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by both the Washington Post and Slate, the online magazine owned by the Washington Post Company. The book documents the first 100 days of the notorious detention center in Cuba, focusing on conflicts among officials concerning transparency, military protocol, and detainee treatment.
Appearing in the public policy section of the Washington Post’s “Best Books of 2009” holiday gift guide, The Least Worst Place was deemed “an important and compelling work that others will turn to fruitfully in writing the full history of Guantánamo” by reviewer Peter Finn in June 2009.
Writing separately for a list of Slate’s “best reads of 2009,” senior editor Dahlia Lithwick called The Least Worst Place “the most important legal book I read this year.... It’s a detailed look at an unmined sliver of history: the very first decisions taken about the camp detainees.... While we tend to think of the disaster that is Guantánamo as an inevitability, Greenberg provides a taxonomy of what went wrong and shows us that it could all have come out very differently.”
Posted on December 23, 2009