I admit that when I first saw the title of Karen Greenberg's The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days, I was a bit concerned. I couldn't match the description of Guantanamo as the 'least worst' anything with the images of orange jumpsuit-clad detainees with bags on their heads shackled to the floor of a military cargo plane or them shuffling off to their make-shift wire mesh cells. But displaying the kind of intellectual rigor and analysis that was sorely lacking during the period it portrays, Karen's book challenges our perceptions and greatly adds to our understanding of how we ended up in such a mess.

The most common defense of the Bush administration's policies on detention and interrogation is that the period just after 9/11 was dominated by constant threats of new attacks and top officials were casting around for anything that would keep the country safe. We now know from this and other recent revelations that top Bush officials consciously chose to grasp at straws rather than rely on the established procedures designed for just this mission and fought the existing military and law enforcement leadership to implement their disastrous policies. We got the Guantanamo we know today because that's the way the Bush administration wanted it.

The important lesson of Karen's book, and accounts like that of former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, is that it didn't have to be this way. It is depressing reading how the Bush administration led the United States to adopt an official policy of unlawful detention and torture, but we must get at all the facts if we are going to rebut Bush apologists and the lazy analysis prevalent in the debate about torture. President Obama's instinct to "resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future" is correct, but his desire to turn the page on this dark chapter is inconsistent with those words. Trying to forget this ever happened is not going to bring America closer together, but rather preserve the status quo division. Karen's book should be part of the beginning of the examination of the Bush administration's policies on unlawful detention and torture, not the end.