Thanks for writing so well and candidly about such a complex, contentious issue. I agree entirely that if U.S. courts find these captives innocent, then they need to be compensated somehow for the years lost, the trauma of incarceration, even the brutality of torture when it occurred.

But when Congress is so spineless that it can't even offer funds to shut Guantánamo down, because of fear of repercussions from anxious constituents, then the likelihood of its ever approving compensation measures seems, alas, remote indeed.

What it would take, psychologically, for Americans to accept the need for such compensation is surely an acceptance—bitter, rueful, chagrined—that the whole edifice of thinking that made possible the imprisonment without trial of "enemy combatants" was on its face flat-out wrong, un-American, inimical to our Constitution.

Are we there yet? I wish we were, but I'm not holding my breath.