Useful review essay of a recent book on the subject here. Based on interviews with distinguished human rights attorney Michael Ratner, here is some of what we learn about the concentration camps run by the United States government:

“Enemy combatants sent to Guantanamo were initially quartered at Camp X-Ray, a desolate place surrounded by razor wire and gun turrets. The cells where human beings are caged are covered on three sides with steel mess wire, and are exposed to the blazing Caribbean sun and hard rains. All-American boys and girls assigned as guards pass the cages twice every minute, not because the prisoners have any chance of escaping, but simply to torment them. To soften them up for interrogation.

“Take note, readers: people require privacy in order to maintain their self-respect. Take away their privacy, while abusing their minds and bodies, and eventually you destroy their sense of personal identity. And then they become putty in your hands.

“The purpose of Camp X-Ray, like all of Guantanamo’s detention facilities, is the slow, calculated murder of the spirit. It’s a place where people are subjected to unbearable, humiliating and degrading forms of abuse every minute of every day. They sleep on concrete floors, and are denied clothing, medical attention and food. Unless, of course, they cooperate.

“As Major General Geoffrey Miller, the camp commandant, once boasted, many detainees have cooperated during the climatic hours they spend in Guantanamo’s interrogation booths, which Ratner describes as ‘trailers, really.’

“Guantanamo is also a laboratory, where new methods of destroying the human spirit are constantly being tried. Thus, sometime in the middle of 2002, a number of prisoners were transferred from Camp X-Ray to Camp Delta, which is different in so far as it separates detainees according to their status. Those who cooperate are segregated from those who do not, and those who are deemed to be troublemakers get special attention in their own private quarters.

“Guantanamo is further divided into Camp Echo which is a separate facility for those facing trial by military commission. (Camp Echo is aptly name. It was built by Halliburton’s subsidiary, Kellogg Brown Root, which in an earlier lifetime built the detention facilities which replaced in the infamous Tiger Cages on Con Son Island, 90 miles off the Coast of South Vietnam). Camps Romeo and Tango consist of isolation cells, where naked Muslim men are, in scenes reminiscent of Abu Ghraib, gawked at by female American guards, as yet another form of spiritual assassination.

“The purpose of continual softening up detainees for interrogation, and then interrogating them, is twofold. The first purpose is to coerce confessions that result in convictions. The second is to obtain information for use in the war on terror.

“Convictions are preordained, but so far there is no verifiable evidence that any useful intelligence has ever been produced. However, in return for signing a false confession, or bearing false witness against another Muslim, or for turning into a double agent, the ultimate reward is a Big Mac.

“Imagine a world where, after two years of privation and the most sophisticated physical and psychological torture techniques ever devised by cummings’ man-unkind, the ultimate reward is a Big Mac. You have to wonder, what kind of sick mind is capable of creating such a hellhole?”