This book, based on a two-year study of former prisoners of the U.S. government's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Scrupulously researched and devoid of rhetoric, the book deepens the story of post-9/11 America and the nation's descent into the netherworld of prisoner abuse. Researchers interviewed more than sixty former Guantánamo detainees in nine countries, as well as key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators, lawyers for detainees, and other camp personnel. We hear directly from former detainees as they describe the events surrounding their capture, their years of incarceration, and the myriad difficulties preventing many from resuming a normal life upon returning home.

The Witnesses presents findings from the first study of victim-witnesses who have testified before an international war crimes tribunal. Witnesses who have appeared before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia describe their family tragedies, their moral duty to testify on behalf of the dead, their courtroom encounters with the accused, their aspirations for justice, and their disappointments.

My Neighbor, My Enemy Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity
Edited by Eric Stover and
Harvey Weinstein
Forward by Ariel Dorfman
www.cambridge.org

My Neighbor, My Enemy tackles a crucial and highly topical issue - how do countries rebuild after ethnic cleansing and genocide? And what role do trials and tribunals play in social reconstruction and reconciliation? By talking with people in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and carrying out extensive surveys, the authors explore what people think about their past and the future. Their conclusions controversially suggest that international or local trials may have little relevance to reconciliation in post-war countries. Communities understand justice far more broadly than it is defined by the international community and the relationship of trauma to a desire for trials is not clear-cut. The authors offer an ecological model of social reconstruction and conclude that coordinated multi-systemic strategies must be implemented if social repair is to occur. Finally, the authors suggest that while trials are essential to combat impunity and punish the guilty, their strengths and limitations must be acknowledged.

On a warm spring morning in 1999, in the midst of NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, Serbian security and paramilitary forces descended on the small village of Cuska, near the western Kosovo city of Pec. Soldiers with painted faces and masks rounded up the populations and forced them to assemble in the center of the village. First, they separated the women, children and elderly from the men who had not managed to flee. Then, the security and military forces threatened and robbed the villagers of their money, jewelry and identification papers. They divided the twenty-nine men into three groups and took them into three separate houses and sprayed them repeatedly with automatic weapons. Lastly, they set each house on fire and left them to burn. This gripping investigative account of the massacre establishes the truth of what happened in Cuska, deepens our understanding of war crimes, and sheds light on the world of paramilitaries who carry who mass killings of civilians in the name of state.

In May 1996, William Haglund, an American forensic anthropologist, and a multi-national team of forensic scientists were sent by the International War Tribunal in The Hague to oversee the disinterment of the mass graves in the hills around Srebrenica, Bosnia, and Vukovar, Croatia. They discovered some of the most horrifying atrocities committed since WW II. Eric Stover reveals to us how Haglund excavated the bodies in an infernal slush of mud and decomposing flesh, how he pieced together the bodies of the victims and determined their identities. Peress' frightening matter-of-fact photographs show the forensic team at work and what they discovered.

Witnesses from the Grave explores the world of forensic anthropology through the eyes of one of its foremost practitioners, Clyde Snow, and recounts his many adventures: his examination in Brazil of the skeletal remains of the infamous and elusive Nazi doctor Josef Mengele; his discovery of intriguing new evidence about what lies beneath the battleground of Custer's Last Stand at the Little Bighorn; his identification of the victims of Illinois serial killer John Wayne Gacy; and his tireless search for "the disappeared" from Argentina's "dirty war" of the late 1970's.

The Breaking of Bodies and Minds documents the alarming collaboration of health professionals in the systematic use of physical and psychological torture in Latin America, the Soviet Union and other countries. It details the roles these health personnel play in the apparatus of state repression, the activities they engage in, the historical and social contexts in which these abuses take place, and the ways in which such practices are medically "justified." But it also describes the vigorous, sometimes, heroic, efforts of a growing number of health professionals and other people do document abuse, treat and rehabilitate its victims, prevent professional complicity, and, ultimately, end the abuses themselves.