Recently Amnesty International termed the prison at Guantanamo Bay an American “gulag”. The Bush administration and the rightwing seized upon that term in an effort to defend their actions at the prison.

I don’t think Guantanamo is the equivalent of Stalin’s labor camps or Hitler’s concentration camps. But Dachau didn’t start out as an extermination center and the Soviet labor camps were not originally designed to kill large numbers of people. But that’s the road they traveled once they started walking down it. If we tolerate Guantanamo today, we’re in grave danger of walking down the same road.