What Is This World Coming To?

If you wanna get elected president in 2008, the conventional wisdom says you gotta close down Gitmo. The Guantanamo Bay detention facility has become the focus of global protests against alleged “U.S. human rights violations” during the war on terrorism.

Calls to close the facility and release or try its 460 foreign detainees are steadily mounting — they come now from close allies such as Britain and Germany, from the United Nations Committee Against Torture, and from every major human rights group.

The problem is that everybody wants to close Gitmo but nobody wants to accept the prisoners housed there. Even if it were possible to locate them inside the continental United States, (which would then place them behind Constitutional protection) there is the NIMBY factor. (NIMBY=Not In My Back Yard)

No matter where they were housed, the potential for escape exists. If they were to escape from Gitmo, they could try and cross the minefield that separates Guantanamo Bay from Cuba, or they could swim ninety miles to the US mainland.

If they were to escape from a prison located inside the US, their job is half-done for them. The Gitmo ‘detainees’ don’t want to escape and make their way back to their caves in Afghanistan. They want to escape so they can die gloriously during an attack against the infidel United States.

The April suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq was carried out by Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who was held at Guantanamo for more than 3½ years. He didn’t escape. He was released. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that at least thirty-six (not counting al Ajmi) former detainees who, given the benefit of the doubt and released from Gitmo, returned to the battlefield against US forces.

At least six have been killed in combat operations against the United States since being released. Even the Washington Post is questioning the logic of shutting the prison down.

The illogic begins with the fact that Guantanamo now is, by far, the most comfortable and legally accountable detention facility maintained by the United States for foreign prisoners. Conditions there were crude in 2002, but since then one state-of-the art detention facility, modeled on a prison in Indiana, has been built, and a second is under construction. Guantanamo’s detainees have recreation facilities and good medical care; their continued detention is reviewed once a year by military boards, and prisoners are assigned advocates to help argue their cases. Pending a decision by the Supreme Court, they are also able to appeal their detentions to U.S. federal courts, and many have U.S. civilian lawyers.

Some of those who demand that Guantanamo be closed insist that all its detainees either be tried or quickly freed. This is wrongheaded and, for some Europeans, hypocritical. In fighting their own wars against terrorists, Britain and other countries have relied on preventive detention to hold dangerous militants who cannot immediately be charged. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has publicly acknowledged that existing legal categories for detention don’t necessarily address the problem of stateless extremists who may be planning major attacks but haven’t yet committed a specific crime. That doesn’t mean that the current system of detention in Guantanamo is acceptable. But, as we argued in a previous editorial, the United States needs a way to hold some suspects without charge for a limited period under procedures regulated by law and U.S. courts.

There is such a way. It’s called a POW camp. Under the rules of war, prisoners can be held as POW’s for the duration of the conflict. A really good place to locate such a camp might be the terrorist detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay.