With President Obama's call for the closing of Guantanamo and his tasking of groups to consider new detention and interrogation policies, the way we got into this mess becomes more and more important. My intention, in researching and writing The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days was to discover, at the on-the-ground level just what occurred when the Pentagon's intentions to deviate from law, policy, custom, training procedures and the like became clear to those who were first given the mission of detainee incarceration. Yet over the course of my interviews - with soldiers and marines, with officers and enlisted men, with the international community represented by human rights advocates and law enforcement officials involved with Guantanamo, with Washington officials, with detainees themselves, and with myriad observers who visited Guantanamo in these early days - I learned much more than I had set out to do.

I learned that more than telling about detention per so and the path towards interrogation, Guantanamo in its initial period shed light on the elements of breakdown - political, moral and legal - that underlay mistakes in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in domestic policies regarding the war on terror. I learned that, when you scratched the surface of the early Gitmo, you found that good intentions by professionals could only last so long given the determination of the Bush administration to counter any such regard for protocol, and to do so systematically and effectively. The patterns of anti-professionalism sidelined individuals in the national security posts within the executive, pushed aside the uniformed military when they cited law, military code and precedent, and outmaneuvered lawyers who were not on board with the tenets of the Yoo-Bybee memos. The real proof, it seemed, of the question of top-down, versus bottom up violations of the law, was particularly apparent when you looked at those on the ground, faced with actually implementing policy.

In the recent release of documents - beginning with the 2007 ICRC report that was leaked to Mark Danner and continuing through the newly released Department of Justice memos, the Senate Armed Services Committee Report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee Report - there is corroboration for this story of a beginning that was intentionally turned on its head, as the detention and security effort of the JTF 160 - the initial command at Guantanamo- is referred to as a deterrent. Conditions at GTMO are referred to as "inhibit[ing]" successful interrogations and as the "security mission is sometimes the tail wagging the intelligence dog", and the lawlessness and instability necessary to interrogation is described in exquisite detail. Not surprisingly, once General Lehnnert, the general who opposed the Rumsfeld regime was out of the way, the elements of his command - compassion, oversight of interrogations, and a firm line between lawyers, doctors and religious persons working on behalf of the detention effort and those involved in interrogation - were taken away as well. First and foremost, the battle was not just over law but what underlies law, namely order. As Michael Lehnert, struggled to keep order, the parallel unit that Donald Rumsfeld sent down to Guantanamo to get information out of the detainees, focused on means of destabilizing the camp. Where Brigadier General Lehnert wanted the create and fulfill expectations among the detainees, Michael Dunlavey, the head of the interrogation unit, worked to dismantle those expectations. As the SASC report verifies, he pulled the military police out of the interrogation room, discouraged compassion as a policy, and tried to encroach on the space of the doctors, the lawyers and the command team for the detention unit. Guantanamo then became the camp that we soon identified with abuse and torture.

Also important to me in telling this story was the attempt to give the detainees a credible voice. From the time of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the testimony of detainees has been discounted a priori. As if to say that because they have a vested interest in telling the story one way, they were necessarily not to be believed. This to my mind has been one of the most successful ploys of those who argue that torture, abuse and disregard for the rule of law make us safer. There is no more reason to discount their stories than those of the Americans who designed and implemented these policies. And, when you do look into detainee testimonies, you see that they too recognized the difference in the early days of Guantanamo and the later interrogation regime that established itself firmly under the guise of General Miller in the fall of 2002.

The book is not meant to say that there ever was a good Guantanamo. There was not. There is no excuse for intentionally creating a law free zone and declaring to US citizens and the international community, that the United States has decided that it alone could break the law without worry of repercussion. But it is meant to say that left to their own devices, there are those individuals who would follow the law and their own consciences. The banality of goodness displayed itself at Guantanamo. These officers who tried to defy pressure from Washington to evade the Geneva Conventions were not heroes so much as professionals following their training, not moral chest-beaters, but regular guys following the rules.

As for the choices that face the Obama administration, this story offers several lessons for the present and future - and perhaps readers will see others. But for starters, the fact is that the mistakes embodied in bringing so many who were not among "the worst of the worst" to Guantanamo led to secrecy and exclusivity on the part of government officials who did not want their mistakes exposed. It would be a terrible mistake to continue to run from the mistakes of the past. In addition, the professions - military, legal and medical, including psychiatric - need to think long and hard about how to reprimand those who violated the oaths of their practices, so as to consider preventing these crimes in the future. For the president and his team, the lessons of good leadership as demonstrated in the person of Michael Lehnert, should be heeded. There is no substitute for it.