What's going on at Gitmo?

When people protest detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay, I assume they all have visions of Abu Ghraib dancing in their heads: beatings, torture, mock executions, constant humiliation, etc. That’s simply not the case. From Kyndra Miller Rotunda’s new book Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials:

In Guantanamo Bay, where there had been over 24,000 interrogations sessions, the investigators found only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. Two of those involved female interrogators who “touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner ….” (For instance, one time a female interrogator sat briefly on a detainees lap and put her arms around his neck.) In all three cases, the army disciplined the interrogators. (Emphasis and ellipses in original.)

Now look: this doesn’t change the essential problem that the Supreme Court handled so poorly last week, namely indefinite detention without charge. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that Gitmo compares to the Gulag. Rotunda, a JAG intimately involved in the Gitmo proceedings, uses her book to show that the treatment of detainees was by no means inhumane and, for the most part, went above and beyond the required treatment of POWs under Geneva. Needless to say, this is not a book you’ll find in the progressive book club’s catalog, but it’s an important corrective to the popular misconceptions of Gitmo and detainee treatment.