Who are really the people detained at the American base on the island of Cuba? Are they all involved in the September 11th attacks? How and why are they detained there? Have they been tortured there? Is it really a question of ‘a new gulag’, as Amnesty calls it? What will happen to them when the prison closes, as Obama has promised? All these questions, and indeed others of burning topicality, find well documented answers in Guantánamo. Les dérives de la guerre contre le terrorisme (the excesses of the war against terrorism) -André Versaille publishers, the new book by Simon Petermann, honorary professor at the University of Liège.

We already knew that the recent history of this Caribbean bay would not figure amongst the most striking successes of the United States. But we didn’t know to what extent the ‘Gitmo’ penal colony represents, in concentrated fashion, a synthesis of the mistakes that Washington has been able to string together over the eight years spent under the Presidency of George Walker Bush. This consciousness raising is offered to us by this book – one of the rare ones in French – that Simon Petermann has just published. In little over 200 pages, as lively as a good television report, the author paints a complete picture of this penal colony which shows on the surface all the behaviour that has recently tarnished America’s reputation: brutality, arrogance, improvisation, amateurism, contempt for international law, satisfied ignorance of the real world, and obstinate perseverance when in the wrong. But be careful. Simon Petermann does not deliver us a pamphlet. His enquiry, the fruit of long years of observation and research, is that of an academic, not that of a public prosecutor. The exact opposite of an a priori condemnation, he knows how to put things into perspective and, above all, lead the investigation both for the defence and for the prosecution. His work has been notably fed by three successive on site visits (2005, 2006, 2007) as an expert for the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Visits which were ‘often frustrating’, he admits, because ‘completely supervised’ by the military authorities and combined with a total ban on establishing contacts with the detainees. From this sprang a permanent doubt: what is hidden behind the well oiled accounts given by the official version? And from which also sprang a methodological imperative: to draw on all the available sources, including the most suspect and the most off putting, to try offer readers several keys to understanding ‘why the United States committed itself to a path contrary to the ideals on which it was built.’

(1) Simon Petermann, Guantánamo. Les dérives de la guerre contre le terrorisme, éd. André Versaille, 2009, 242 p.