TIME: "What's going on at Gitmo?"

[Inland]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1066878-1,00.html
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One of those inquiries, the findings of which are expected to be issued soon by Air Force Lieut. General Randall Schmidt, was spurred by eyewitness accounts from FBI agents at Gitmo from mid-2002 to mid-2004. According to just-released memos, agents reported seeing captives shackled in a fetal position for 24 hours without food or water and left in their own excrement, another gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head and another who had torn out his hair after being chained all night in a hot room. Former Army Sergeant Erik Saar, who served at Gitmo and wrote Inside the Wire with TIME correspondent Viveca Novak, has described an instance in which a female interrogator smeared fake menstrual blood on a captive's face. It may have been a measure of how detainees are treated that when Army Specialist Sean Baker played the role of an inmate in a 2003 training exercise, he says he was beaten so badly by MPs, who did not know he was one of them, he now has seizures. The Army is investigating the incident, and Baker has filed suit against the government, seeking damages for his injuries.
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What kind of intelligence have detainees provided? The military's official position is that some inmates continue to provide valuable information, ranging from how al-Qaeda raises funds and recruits members to how it plans attacks and builds explosives. Detainees, officials say, have helped identify new prisoners, from Osama bin Laden's bodyguards to rank-and-file militia fighters; late last year, according to officials, a few detainees helped uncover a previously unknown al-Qaeda cell in another country. Still, earlier this year the civilian head of intelligence at Guantanamo admitted in newspaper interviews that the majority of detainees were no longer of much intelligence value and were not even being regularly interrogated.

[mike_c]

1. Guantanamo is one of the most shameful episodes in American...

...history, right up there with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII and the treatment of native Americans. It's shameful because it represents a failure of our own ideals, or-- one might argue- because it reveals those ideals to be more sham than substance. Guantanamo shows that we are just as likely as anyone else to resort to savagery in the name of protecting our self interest, and that the only thing that really separates us from those who've committed worse atrocities is the magnitude of the crimes committed- but that can change anytime if we let circumstances dictate ideals. Once we've begun down that road, it becomes easier and easier to go further and further.

[Gothmog]

2. We need to shut Gitmo down and bulldoze it.

Frank Rich is correct here. Gitmo needs to be closed and bull dozed. It is part of a shameful time in our history. We are now a country that endorses and uses torture.

[JawJaw]

3. Don't close it down

After the Bush crime family have been tried and sentenced for their war crimes, stick them all in a cage in Gitmo and turn the place into a living museum of how not to run a democracy.

[Inland]

4. We need the Mission Impossible team

to convince them the term is over and they are now being interrogated at Gitmo, get confessions and show the video.