The fun-filled ocean resort at Guantánamo Bay | Glenn Greenwald

A growing hunger strike among detainees is mocked by gullible journalists spouting familiar Potemkin Village propaganda

If you're looking for a fun activity-filled resort to take your family for a summer vacation, you simply cannot do better than Club GTMO, according to a new glossy travel guide just published by Robert Johnson, the Military and Defense Editor of Business Insider, under the guise of a news article. Scrumptious meals. Video games galore for the kids. Outdoor sports. Newspapers from your hometown delivered by smiling bellhops to the front door of your villa. Picturesque Caribbean vistas. All that and more can be yours - provided that you're "compliant". What more could vacationers - or prisoners kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges thousands of miles away from their family - possibly want? They are, proclaims Johnson, treated "absurdly well". Not just well: absurdly well. They are, he actually writes, lavished with "resort treatment".

The context for Johnson's glowing thumbs-up is an intensifying hunger strike among (totally ungrateful) prisoners at the camp. Lawyers for the detainees say the hunger strike was triggered "as a protest of the men's indefinite confinement without charge and because of what they said was a return to harsh treatment from past years, including more intrusive searches and confiscation of personal items such as mail from their families." That includes, the lawyers say, a lack of sanitary drinking water which has "already caused some prisoners kidney, urinary and stomach problems". Detainees also complain about the recent manhandling of Korans. One lawyer for 11 detainees, Carlos Warner, identifying himself as a "liberal" supporter of Obama, told CNN that the detainees are now deprived of some privileges they had all the way back in 2006 and said the situation there was "dire".

The US military, needless to say, denies these claims. While detainee lawyers insist that the overwhelming majority of detainees are participating in the hunger strike, US military officials claim that "only" 31 of the 166 are doing so. They do acknowledge that some are being force-fed, a few have been hospitalized for dehydration, and that more and more are participating in the strike. As the New York Times' Charlie Savage notes this morning, the conflicting claims are difficult to resolve. That is in part because journalists have very restricted access to the camp and no access to the detainees.

But none of that is a problem for Robert Johnson. He recently took a trip to Guantánamo - approved and arranged by the US military. He saw parts of the camp - the parts the US military showed him and wanted him to see. He spoke with camp officials and guards, but not any detainees. From that extremely selective picture, he pronounces: "When I visited Guantánamo earlier this month, it was hard not to see things from the military's point of view." He further decrees that "the overriding philosophy on base these days is to treat the detainees really well." One by one, he declares each detainee grievance to be invalid - based exclusively on what camp officials told him and showed him. Shiny pictures with his article are included, accompanied by glib and playful captions such as "Here's what Guantánamo detainees could be eating" underneath a photo showing food in styrofoam containers, and "Detainees get to play sports too (be careful the ball doesn't get caught in the barbed wire)" under a photo of a soccer ball on top of a fence. He then gushes:

"Compliant detainees enjoy a selection of six balanced meals, 25 cable TV channels, classes, and an array of electronic gadgetry and entertainment. Seriously, I'm talking about a Nintendo DS for every compliant detainee, plus Playstation 3 access with a library full of video games."

He does not share what one has to do to be deemed a "compliant detainee", nor does he explain what conditi