Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Await their turn to be interrogated by American officials.

When the New Yorker comes every week, I usually carry it around in my bag for four or five days before actually reading it, so I just last night delved into this past week’s issue. It’s a top notch issue, to be sure. Sometimes there’s nothing really that interesting in there, but this week there’s a fantastic article about the London mayoral race by Calvin Trillin that you’ve got read and a sickeningly illuminating piece by Jeffrey Toobin about Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These days, with the consensus having emerged that the place should be shut down, we don’t really get to hear the administration party line too often, and Toobin skeptically interviewed several officials there whose job it to help rebrand the infamous military base. Toward the end of the piece (SPOILER ALERT), Toobin talks to Admiral Mark Buzby, the head of the Guantanamo Task Force. With an enthusiam that rivals that of Dr. Strangelove’s Buck Turgidson, Buzby explains how Gitmo interrogations work these days, you know, now that they don’t use water pails and electrodes.

“They want those Subway sandwiches!” he said. “Sometimes they just want to talk. Meanwhile, he’s chomping on his Subway B.M.T. It’s all about that give-and-take and that rapport-building. We still get regular questions in for us to ask from the front in the field. We’ll show him a map: ‘Thanks a lot, have a Big Mac.’ ”

Ah, yes. It’s good to know the America dream is alive and well.

Camp Justice [New Yorker]