Nobody who has been around here for more than a month or so is in any doubt where I stand on this issue, so I will add just these points that are somewhat new to the discussion:

Many of the people at Gitmo are there because warlords turned them in for cash bounties. We did no vetting of the process. If you were willing to pay me thousands to denounce a variety of people who would then vanish with no questions asked, I could make a tidy profit. However, you aren't talking about just anybody, you are talking about warlords, who are far more motivated than most people to make that tidy profit, as money would be directly translated into power for them.

Locking up people for years on THAT kind of evidence is about as reprehensible behavior as anybody can think up...unless you also torture them. To say that they are being treated rather well is total crap. We locked people up on no evidence for years. Even if we locked them into cells that were nice and clean, we locked them up in cells...in Cuba, where it is hotter than hell for 13 months out of the year. Indefinite detention on no evidence is unjustifiable by all but the greatest coward (there is a chance that they might hurt me, so I'll just ignore all decency and lock them up in a hell hole just in case).

The second part was the recently released Justice Department memo to the CIA which delivered the opinion that any means of interrogation was acceptable as long as it could be plausibly argued that the interrogator didn't desire to harm the individual being interrogated. That granted the right to use any form of torture as long as the torturer was able to say with a straight face that they didn't actually want to hurt anybody.

These actions are shameful on the part of any government. They stink of cowardice, since it is only very fearful people who would go to those lengths, and only very fearful people who would support those actions. It's not the reasoned response of a stable individual, but the panicky overreaction of someone striking out blindly in fear.

Fear is a big motivator, but it almost never results in anything good or noble. If we want to be a moral society, we can never do it by hiding under the bed and striking out at all who wander by, nor can we do it by going out and threatening random people with violence just in case they might have thought about doing harm to us. If you want to be moral, you have to act moral, and live with the consequences (since this world kills everybody who does that, even though they are revered later, the consequences are not insignificant).