What makes us different from our enemies is our capacity to treat those in-custody properly. What also makes us different is our willingness to expose our failures at this.

Its perfectly appropriate for Americans to criticize how we treat prisoners at Gitmo and demand we do better. What's inappropriate is using hyped rhetoric to paint an exaggerated picture of the problems.

I personally believe the calls to close down Gitmo are shortsighted and ill-advised. What we need to do is openly admit when problems occur and fix them so they don't repeat themselves.

Gitmo was born out of 9/11 and not the Iraq war. We shouldn't confuse our dismay about the latter with our resolve to prevent a repeat of the former.