Should Guantánamo Bay be shut down? Senator Joseph Biden, the leading Democrat on the Senate's foreign relations committee, thinks so.
Juan Cole agrees on the grounds that the detention and interrogation centre "was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic".
Top of Blogdex this morning, however, was Charles Krauthammer's response to Biden, in which he calls the response to the reports of abuse of the Qur'an at Gitmo "self-flagellation".
Meanwhile, the Observer's Nick Cohen takes issue with the Amnesty International secretary general, Irene Khan's, recent assertion that "Guantánamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law".
"At Guantanamo Bay, no one has died of starvation, disease or exhaustion, and no prisoners have been executed," Cohen counters.
(It's worth noting, though, that the US government is happy to quote Amnesty reports on other countries when it chooses, as Dana Milbank points out in the Washington Post.)
Amnesty now appears to be rowing back from Khan's claim, not least in an interview with William Schulz, its executive director in the US, on Fox News. Not surprisingly, that hasn't stopped some bloggers from hauling Amnesty over the coals over its sloppy analogy.
As a Houston Chronicle leader argues, Khan's comment can only undermine the human rights group's core agenda.
