The Marines that I've talked to that have done time at GitMo paint a picture somewhat at odds with the "torture" idea. The picture they paint is one where the inmates are kept in comfort. They are totally micromanaged, under constant scrutiny, and everything is video taped. The inmates came from one of the more inhospitable environments known on Earth and are kept in Western style comfort. One guy retold an anecdote where folks got their asses in a sling re. reports of "torture" via lawyers and human rights orgs that have access to the prisoners. The "torture" turned out to be a reference to air conditioning.
I agree that given the kid's age when he was taken to Afghanistan and then picked up, he wouldn't have had any choice in the matter. But there's millions of entirely innocent kids dealing with huge hardship, in the world every year, many of them dying. If I have to choose which of those to be especially sympathetic towards, a kid that was engaged in a fight with US military forces is really low on the list.
The discussion of civilian trials and established guilt, in those environments of careful evidence rules and a presumption of innocence, is lost on me. Imagine your kid is in some 3rd world shithole risking their life every day trying to keep the local shitheads at bay so the families in the area can raise their kids in relative safety. Your kid gets in a firefight with those shitheads. Buddies of your kid go down, those shitheads are doing their level best to kill your kid. These are not abstract ideas, it's your kid. Unlike most current world military orgs, and ALL military orgs going back thousands of years, the Americans don't kill all the enemy combatants, instead they take some prisoners and send them to quite comfort at GitMo. Sure, their life there isn't rich, but they're alive. The alternative really is "not alive".
They were enemy combatants in a fight where bad guys don't really "surrender" in the classic WW2 sense. Think of every one of them as a guy that was trying to kill your kid, as that kid stood in the way of bad guys and local families just trying to raise their kids. But we're Americans, and we try incredibly hard not to kill a bad guy if circumstances allow. But we perceived those bad guys as long term threats and as potential intelligence sources. So we built a comfortable prison for them.
Yes, shitty things happen. Kids that had a lot of bad luck end up stuck in no-win situations where they actively engage in evil. But our compassion is finite. We should pour that compassion on entirely innocent kids, not the kids that have "some" innocence.
Books @ Amazon "If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart