Closing Guantánamo: Easier said than done

Ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay was a fine act of symbolism, said the Portland Oregonian in an editorial. But now that the political and security implications are becoming evident, President Obama is facing “one of the thorniest knots of his young presidency.” Just days after he took office, in January, Obama ordered the U.S. detention center in Cuba closed within a year and the military commission system used to prosecute suspected terrorists suspended. Civil libertarians and the world cheered. But the administration is now realizing that disposing of the 241 remaining detainees poses major legal and logistical problems—and congressional Republicans are seizing on the issue to score some points. In media appearances and in a video posted on the Internet, the GOP is warning that if the White House relocates some of Gitmo’s remaining 241 detainees to U.S. prisons, they could pose an unspecified threat to local communities. “TERRORISTS,” the video warns in bold, scary letters, “COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU.”

Even the White House is having second thoughts, said William Glaberson in The New York Times. After consulting with administration lawyers, Obama has decided to revive Gitmo’s military tribunals to try some detainees—those who probably couldn’t be convicted in federal courts. There are between 50 and 100 hardened al Qaida terrorists at the prison, administration officials believe, and the evidence against some of them is inadmissible in U.S. courts—consisting of hearsay or evidence obtained under torture. A military tribunal, with its looser rules of evidence, could keep the most dangerous detainees locked up. “The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

So closing Guantánamo will be complicated, said Jay Bookman in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That doesn’t mean there’s any justification for the Republicans’ scare campaign. The U.S. prison system currently houses tens of thousands of spree killers, vicious murderers, Mafia bosses, and even terrorists, like Jose Padilla, failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, and “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui. “Do we really fear that our enemies are some sort of terrorist supermen who cannot be safely held in federal high-security prisons?”

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Scoff if you will, but the danger from Obama’s approach is real, said Debra Burlingame in The Wall Street Journal. Just two weeks ago, al Qaida operative Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who’d hoped to carry out post-9/11 cyanide bomb attacks here, was allowed to plead guilty in civilian court to “one count of ‘material support.’” At worst he’ll get 15 years—and because of time served, that could be reduced to eight. Should we release al Qaida operatives after only five or 10 years in prison, so they can attack us again? Once terrorists are under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, said the Journal in an editorial, liberal judges may find their “rights’’ have been violated and set them free. “That would be an unmitigated disaster.”

All these hypothetical scenarios ignore one basic fact, said Democratic Rep. Jim Moran in The Washington Post. In ordering the closure of a gulag in which the U.S. held hundreds of people indefinitely without charges, Obama has affirmed that this country “is governed by the rule of law and defined by our embrace of universal human rights.” Sorting out those 241 detainees safely and legally won’t be easy, but it’s the right thing to do. “Often, doing the right thing is neither popular nor convenient.”