Perhaps that's true, but I have no way of knowing what the conditions are like. I'd have more confidence that my country is operating such facilities in a manne

Perhaps that's true, but I have no way of knowing what the conditions are like. I'd have more confidence that my country is operating such facilities in a manner that meets at least basic standards if they didn't seem to be taking overt steps to avoid our own legal system's oversight. Congress has been generally sympathetic, and passed laws giving law-enforcement agencies and the military substantial deference, so it's not as if they risk oversight by some hostile foreign power, or the UN or something. And yet still the military is operating some kind of weird extra-territorial prison, which it's trying to keep our country's own courts from overseeing. What are they hiding, and why? On a basic level, we operate a prison in an area that the U.S. fully controls in perpetuity, a permanent U.S. facility that no other country exercises any control over, either now, for about 100 years into the past, or at any point in the foreseeable future. It is in effect a U.S. territory, in the sense that it is under the permanent control of the U.S., and has been for many decades. But we're claiming that it is nevertheless "in a foreign country" due a technicality, and therefore not subject to U.S. courts' jurisdiction, or indeed the jurisdiction of any other country's courts (not even those of the country that we claim has sovereignty over it). That sure seems shady, and like something is being hidden. If the USSR or any other country had claimed such an arrangement, "but look, it's not in the USSR, technically, just a perpetual lease to the USSR", we would have ridiculed it as a quasi-legalistic farce. It doesn't necessarily prove that the people operating Guantanamo are engaged in illegal activity, but the fact that they have gone out of their way to base their activities in some kind of legal no-man's land that isn't subject to any country's domestic jurisdiction doesn't give one great confidence that they are complying with American legal and ethical norms.