Invisible Men - The not-people we're not holding at Guantanamo Bay. By Dahlia Lithwick

Invisible Men - The not-people we're not holding at Guantanamo Bay. By Dahlia Lithwick

This Slate article about Guantanamo Bay claims "most of the prisoners are guilty only of bad luck" and the "real justification for the continued disgrace that is Guantanamo is that the government refuses to admit it's made a mistake".

I have difficulty believing that the US would hold and interrogate 400 people simply because they "owned a Casio watch", or that they continue to hold them because the administration doesn't want to admit their mistake. The administration certainly is aware of the worldwide condemnation of the US for operating this camp. I don't think it would continue unless the information gleened from the detainees was valuble.

The article admits that prisoners are being released, but spins this as "draining the camp slowly" to keep it from being news. More likely they are released soon after we are convinced they have no more intelligence value.

My Big Picture view of this is that we're percieved by the world as losing the moral high ground, and this makes international cooperation more difficult, as well as inspire our enemies. I don't know what kind of intelligence they are getting from Guantanamo but it better be useful enough to make up for the damage it has done. That's the kind of tough call that the government must make as we continue the fight.