Molly Crabapple wrote about Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba:

Camp X-Ray has been abandoned for over a decade. Birds nest on the razor wire. Vines have overtaken the cages. With the breeze and butterflies, one could think it is just a still-standing reminder of a shameful past. For the current prisoners who passed through X-Ray, it is still part of their reality. They may have left, but they are not free.

In X-Ray’s interrogation huts, and later in the permanent prisons of Camp Delta, Americans practiced short-shackling, stress positions, dry-boarding (stuffing rags down a man’s throat and taping his nose and mouth shut), and sexual humiliation. Female interrogators molested detainees and smeared them with fake menstrual blood, according to Inside the Wire, a book written by a former sergeant who witnessed the incident at Gitmo. Former detainee Ruhal Ahmed described being chained in a squatting position and left for days to defecate on himself while dogs growled in his face. A memo by JAG (Judge Advocate General Corps) lawyer Diane Beaver, “Legal Review of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques,” describes water-boarding, using extreme heat and cold, beatings—termed “non-injurious physical contact”—and convincing the detainee that his family was in danger of torture or death as totally A-OK once approved.

Shameful and sickening.