Some American politicians (and protesters) have labelled the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay a concentration camp, and have drawn parallels to how Nazi Germany treated prisoners during WW2.

Those type of statements are ludicrous, laughable, and no further time needs to be spent thinking that what the Americans have set up is a concentration camp. Clearly, it's not. American's don't hate Arabs and wish to extinguish them, as the Germans felt towards the Jews.

Instead, people should be asking themselves, “What is the Guantanamo Bay prison? What is it for? Why does the U.S. need a prison 50 miles off the coast of Miami?”

The answer to this is quite clear. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5 decades ago, that any prisoner kept inside the United States has the full protection of the constitution, including the right to counsel and the right to a speedy trial amoung others (called “due process“). It also ruled that U.S. prisoners kept outside the borders of the United States are not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see the 1950 Supreme Court ruling in Johnson v. Eisentrager).

Guantanamo Bay Prison is a perfect legal no-mans-land. It is under the full control of the U.S., yet it does not belong to any country. Some terror suspects are being kept imprisoned on U.S. Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf - similarly they are in international waters (not on U.S. soil) and do not get constitutional protection.

So that, there, is really the issue. The U.S. has found a legal loophole in the constitution. A place where it can detain people, yet reject their right to a lawyer, a trial, to talk to their families, or even to acknowledge that someone is in custody. It can stretch the boundaries by treating prisoners in a way that is not legal inside United States prisons - keeping them awake for 2 or 3 days in a row, verbal and mental abuse, etc.

The U.S. is not about to close this handy loophole it has found. I don't think prisoners are being physically tortured there (not in the Abu Gharib sense), but having a prison that has no rules certainly has its benefits in other ways.