They talked about the war in Iraq and prescription drug benefits, debated gay marriage and discussed the particulars of our efforts to capture Osama Bin Laden. But one word you rarely heard President Bush or Senator John Kerry utter throughout the 2004 presidential campaign was Guantanamo.

Indeed, it was as if the US$155 million ($216 million) prison in Cuba built - David Rose reminds us in his new book - by Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, didn't exist.

And that is exactly as the Government wanted things to be.

How did America's most secretive, highly guarded and internationally offensive prison become such a non-issue? The answer, Rose asserts, is that the Bush Administration has conducted a campaign to make it so.

From the very beginning, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and the President asserted that Guantanamo was where we held the worst of the worst, the really bad guys. As Cheney said, "They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of innocent Americans, if they can, and they are prepared to die in the effort."

In the wake of 9/11, Rose argues, the US Government used the terror threat as an excuse to free itself of the Geneva Accords.

On November 13, 2001, President Bush issued a Presidential Military Order declaring that captured al Qaeda terrorists could be tried by special military commissions, free of the restrictions imposed by the civilian courts.

On this day, Guantanamo was born.

Very quickly, the definition of unlawful combatant stretched beyond al Qaeda to include not just someone thought to have engaged directly in terrorism against America, but anyone captured in Afghanistan suspected of fighting with the Taleban - a very different thing.

The result? The prison's population swelled to about 600 men, against whom no charges were filed for more than two years. They came from all over the world, in shackles and hoods, to sit and sweat in the Cuban sun and submit to questioning.

Rose is one of the first writers to publish a book on this unorthodox prison, and it's not hard to understand why.

Even though reporters are allowed there, they will have their lifelong visitation rights revoked by officials if they attempt to speak to a detainee or even if they reply to one who has spoken.

In spite of these limitations, Rose does a good job of making this faraway legal black hole come to life. He visited the prison in October 2003, after the initial cages known as X-Ray were replaced with the newly constructed Delta. What he describes is an institutional nightmare.

Most of the prisoners are kept in maximum security conditions. If they co-operate, they can be led in cuffs and leg irons to a covered yard for 20 minutes of exercises with one other detainee, followed by a five-minute shower.