Senator Burr (R. NC) recently visited Guantanamo and blogged about it.  Here's an excerpt:

From my visit today, it appears to me that everything from the design of the facilities to the detailed operating procedures of the guard force, medical professionals, and support staff is well thought out and in keeping with our Nation's highest ideals.

If anyone receives mistreatment at Guantanamo, it is the guard force.  They must endure frequent verbal and physical attacks from detainees while maintaining the highest standard of care for those same individuals.

Instead of focusing on closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay, we need to think long and hard about where we can hold some of these very hardened and dangerous individuals, many of whom could never be incarcerated in the United States.

I read this just days after reading a column by Karen Greenberg who has written a book about the early days of Guantanamo.  She wrote:

The Joint Task Force, advised by U.S. Southern Command, was essentially left on its own to improvise a regime of care and custody for the allegedly hardened al-Qaida terrorists — whom the Bush administration famously called "the worst of the worst" — who would be coming their way. The idea, as Lehnert told me he understood it, was to detain them and wait for a legal process to begin.

In the absence of new policy guidance about how to treat the detainees, Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other U.S. laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment. One lawyer for the Judge Advocate General Corps, Lt. Col. Tim Miller, told me that he used the enemy-POW guidelines as his "working manual."

The task force set to work around the clock, processing the detainees upon arrival, administering medical treatment and providing general care in the cells of the newly built Camp X-Ray. Lehnert's lawyers studied the 143 articles of the Geneva Conventions, paying particular attention to Common Article 3, which prohibits "humiliating and degrading treatment." The head of the operation's detention unit, Col. Terry Carrico, summed up the situation to a team of Marine Corps interviewers several weeks into the mission: "The Geneva Conventions don't officially apply, but they do apply."

She goes on to write that early signs of trouble appeared when the commanders on the ground asked for representatives of the International Commitee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to be sent as was required by the Geneva Conventions.  Their request was ignored by Washington and absent any direction from their civilian bosses the military commanders called the ICRC directly to get advice on ensuring the prisoners' safety and dignity as required by the Conventions.  That ticked off the folks in DC to say the least.  Eventually the military commanders were replaced and the Guantanamo that we came to know in the ensuing years took shape:

Once Lehnert's troops departed, a new Guantanamo took shape — the Guantanamo that an appalled world has come to know over the past seven years. Inmates were kept in isolation, interrogation became the core mission, hunger strikers were regularly force-fed, and above all, the promise of a legal resolution to the detainees' cases has eluded hundreds of prisoners.

As Obama moves to close Guantanamo down, the story of Joint Task Force 160 takes on new significance. Had the United States been willing to trust in the professionalism of its superb military, it could have avoided one of the most shameful passages in its history.

Lehnert still regrets the legal limbo that Guantanamo became — and the damage that did to America's "stature in the world." As he put it, "the juice wasn't worth the squeeze."

I'm not going to dispute Sen. Burr's assessment of the current atmosphere at Guantanamo, but I am going to say that from what I've read and heard over the years it's a political necessity for the facility to be shut down because it has come to represent a lot of very negative perceptions of the US.  Undoubtedly there are some very bad people being held there, but we've heard over the years that lots of not-bad people were swept up with the very bad people and were treated much the same way as the very bad.  Unfortunately for them, and us, they were held for years without any recourse and now our country has to deal with the black eye that their treatment has given us.  It's too bad because Guantanamo probably is the best place to keep the remaining truly bad guys, but because we screwed up we are pretty much forced to shut down Gitmo and move them.