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We’ve been tossing the hot potato from Gitmo to Iraq to Lebanon to keep us distracted from how badly we’re performing and/or abusing law in each of these areas. Just as public sentiment starts to boil over about one, bam-whoosh-kapow, we’re transported to another. Today, we’re bounced back to Gitmo via an AP report about prisoner attacks on guards.

Incident reports reviewed by The Associated Press indicate Military Police guards are routinely head-butted, spat upon and doused by “cocktails” of feces, urine, vomit and sperm collected in meal cups by the prisoners.

They’ve been repeatedly grabbed, punched or assaulted by prisoners who reach through the small “bean holes” used to deliver food and blankets through cell doors, the reports say.

Bean holes. Nice.

Like most good scare pieces, the facts are dumped between scary general statements (see above) and scary specific stories. Here is a fact:

Serious assaults requiring medical attention, however, are rare, the reports indicate.

Queue the specific stories of horror, including eye-gouging, spork-stabbing, spitting, Quran destruction, pieces of rust used to “go for the jugular,” radio-tossing, sink-tossing, rock-tossing, hip attacks, and assaults “with a bloody tail torn from a lizard.”

That extended diatribe sounds awful, and I am sure a number of guards have had to endure plenty of unpleasantries. But let us remember this fact:

Serious assaults requiring medical attention, however, are rare, the reports indicate.

Additionally, in a place that has only now been told to comply with the Geneva Convention, you’d have a hard time convincing me these guards didn’t make sure any ornery prisoner got at least twice as much as he gave.

Another important fact kinda jammed in the first third of the article:

At one point, more than 600 foreign men captured in the war on terror were kept there. Many have been released to their home countries, reducing the current population to about 450. Ten detainees have been accused of war crimes, but no one has been tried.

600 captured, 450 remain, 10 accused, 0 tried. After how long again?

These men may or may not be monsters; it’s tough to know with all the secrecy and refusal of oversight. But one thing I do know: if you cage people this long and give them this little hope, monstrous behavior is inevitable.

Part of the monstrosity involves attacks on the female guards:

In all, nearly a quarter of incidents involved female guards, the reports show.

“They absolutely target female guards,” Nicolucci said. “They have a lot of cultural biases about females, and we let them know in our culture that females do everything males do in a professional job environment, and we just hold firm.”

I guess if you were a true feminist, you’d hold Gitmo up as a paragon of feminism. You know, right along with Abu Ghraib.