Karen Greenberg joins us this week at Book Club for discussion of her book The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. Greenberg details the period at Guantanamo Bay from December 2001 through March 2002, when 300 prisoners captured in Afghanistan from the newly launched war on terror were brought to the prison camp. The book's title references the December 2001 statement from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Guantanamo might be "the least worst place" to send the detainees.

Greenberg writes in the preface:

Seen through the eyes of the officers on the ground, these 100 days shed light on later crimes that were ordered and committed at Guantanamo, making us wonder: Could those subsequent circumstances have been avoided? Though fleeting, these early days suggest as much by showing us the human condition when it tends toward dignity rather than disgrace.

Greenberg is the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security, co-editor of The Enemy Combatants Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror and author of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.

We have an all-star lineup joining us for this week's discussion, running the full gamut from legal experts to military officers who have served at Guantanamo and in Iraq to award-winning investigative journalists. The participants are Peter Bergen, journalist, terrorism analyst and author of Holy War, Inc; Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at American Progress, where he writes frequently on torture and the challenges of Guantanamo; Matthew Alexander, a 14 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, leader of elite interrogations teams in Iraq, and author of How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq; Erik Saar, an army sergeant who served at Guantanamo Bay for six months and co-author of Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier's Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo; Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer, legal professor at Columbia University, and contributor to Harper's Magazine; Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, co-counsel for Guantanamo detainees in front of the Supreme Court in 2004, and author of Guantanamo: What the World Should Know; and Barton Gellman, a special projects reporter for the Washington Post and author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (check out our book club discussion on Angler here.)