You're right, the North Korean prison camps by all accounts seem worse, but the Wikipedia article actually contained a lot of information that was new to me. For example...

In 2004 Spc. Sean Baker, a soldier posing as a prisoner during training exercises at the camp, was beaten so severely that he suffered a brain injury and seizures.

How many deaths are swept under the rug at places like Gitmo or at CIA black sites? If they're beating people to the point of brain injury, I'm guessing it happens.

The trend is what is disturbing. As time moved over the last 10 years they got closer rather than farther apart.

How so? All but 164 detainees have been released from Guantanamo. They were never close, and Guanatanamo is slowly being shut down.

Hopeless suicides, infinite detention, torture (by the definitions of lots of countries other than the one employing the guards), etc. Let's say N. Korea camps are "boiling." It wasn't that Gitmo is boiling like N. Korea, but we did see a nasty trend of turning up the heat on the stove rather than cooling things down or keeping things room temperature. The trend was nasty enough that as soon as a new POTUS got in office an executive order was signed within days—January 22 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ClosureOfGuantana... , even if we still haven't worked out the execution of that order for various political reasons.

While true, one reason the U.S. doesn't need Gitmo so much anymore is we're still going after and finding the same people, but now they are executed with drones, rather than captured.

If one of the parties had allowed it, we could have dissolved Gitmo years ago