Selling Guantanamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America's Most Notorious Military Prison

Americans have been sold a bill of goods on the rationale for detaining "unlawful combatants" at the Guantanamo prison facility according to this probing study. Hickman, associate professor of govern-ment at Berry College, makes a bold case that official Washington keeps the majority of these men imprisoned as pawns in an ongoing propaganda war manufactured for domestic consumption. He con-tends that these prisoners are not terror-plot participants, but insignificant minnows swept up in the chaos of war. Hickman sees three "alternative explanations" for Guantanamo: using prisoner transfers as a way to declare victory in Afghanistan in order to focus on Iraq, to punish these prisoners as stand-ins for more senior al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives, and to telegraph the dawn of a neoconservative U.S. foreign policy that operates with little consideration for constitutional protections or international agreements like the Geneva Convention. Given these ferocious assessments, his critique of Barack Obama's continuation of Bush-era detainment policies is surprisingly muted. Confronted by the lack of public outrage from journalists, filmmakers, and others well-positioned to speak out on the issue, Hickman (Reopening the Space Frontier) concludes that future American presidents will have a firmer foundation from which to dupe the public into going along with dubious detention policies. (May)