Camp Gitmo: It gets better all the time

It's been a busy summer at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The joint task force in charge of the 226 remaining detainees is spending about $440,000 to expand the recreation yards at Camp 6. At nearby Camp 4, which offers communal living for the most "compliant" captives, the soccer yard is being enlarged. At Camp 5, a maximum-security facility, a $73,000 classroom is under construction. In March, the task force added art classes to the thrice-weekly instruction it offers in Arabic, Pashtu and English, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Though President Obama vowed on his second day in office to close the detention center within a year, Gitmo's officers say they intend to continue spending previously budgeted funds to improve life at the center until the last detainee leaves. "It's business as usual around here," the task force's deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Rafael O'Ferrall, told me two weeks ago during one of the official tours that Gitmo offers outsiders.

The point of the tour is to show that Gitmo, which Obama called a "stain" on America's reputation, has become a model, if somewhat surreal, detention center. And therefore that closing it and relocating its inmates is a largely empty political gesture that makes little sense.

My hosts would never dare publicly challenge their commander in chief's orders. But they clearly believe that Gitmo no longer deserves to be seen as a symbol of human rights abuses. "This place is synonymous with military abuse, and it's just not fair," said Rear Adm. Thomas H. Copeman III, the task force's commander.

Officers at Gitmo are eager to distance themselves from the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that senior Bush administration officials approved soon after 9/11. "No one was ever waterboarded at Gitmo," said Army Col. Bruce E. Vargo, commander of the Joint Detention Group.

Although it's true that a 2005 Pentagon report concluded, after examining 26 complaints from FBI agents involving a small portion of more than 24,000 interrogations at Gitmo, that a few "high-value detainees" had been subjected to treatment that was "degrading and abusive," it "did not rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment" or torture. Furthermore, those techniques -- such as loud music, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation and prolonged shackling -- ended long ago at Gitmo, officers say. Since 2004, interrogation methods have adhered to the Army Field Manual, said Paul B. Rester, the Pentagon official in charge of interrogations: "Loud music has no place in my world."