Guantánamo: What happens to the prisoners now?

By ordering the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said Gary Kamiya in Salon.com, President Obama has confronted a “toxic legacy” of the war on terror. Obama last week also halted Gitmo’s military tribunals, shut the CIA’s secret overseas prison system, and banned torture as an interrogation technique. Guantánamo was a particularly ugly symbol of the Bush administration’s distortion of American values: Within its barbed-wire fences, outside the reach of U.S. jurisdiction, hundreds of terrorist suspects have rotted amid brutal treatment and harsh conditions for years, held without charge and due process. Too bad it will take a year for the prison to close, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “In terms of America’s moral standing in the world, every day Guantánamo remains open is a day too long.”

Fine—let’s just release all 245 detainees onto Main Street, USA, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Obviously, that’s a ridiculous proposal, but so is the notion that we can treat terrorists like ordinary criminals and try them in U.S. courts. As Obama himself now admits, many of the enemy combatants are “very dangerous,” and some haven’t committed provable crimes. Does that mean letting these extremists go? And what do we do with the hard-core, “dangerous enemy combatants,” such as 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? Not surprisingly, no one in Congress is leaping at the chance to incarcerate al Qaida leaders in prisons in their home districts, which would immediately become terrorism targets.

As for all the “innocent” men who liberals think have been housed at Gitmo, said Thomas Joscelyn in The Weekly Standard, look at what happens when we free them. Take the case of Said Ali al-Shihri, who insisted during hearings at Gitmo that “he was just a Muslim, not a terrorist.” Released in 2007, al-Shihri went through a Saudi “rehabilitation program” for Islamic extremists—and recently turned up as the new deputy leader of al Qaida in Yemen. He is believed to have helped bomb the U.S. Embassy there. How many other ticking time bombs are there at Gitmo, waiting to take revenge? Nobody really knows, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. The Bush administration originally claimed that all 779 of Guantánamo’s inmates were “the worst of the worst,” but eventually released more than 500 of them because they were either common Taliban foot soldiers or innocents swept up by bounty hunters. Its accounting of remaining prisoners is no less muddled. So “let’s attempt to get past the undifferentiated orange jumpsuits, which tell us virtually nothing at all.”

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True enough, said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, which is why the detainees must be sorted into three categories. The obviously guilty can be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts, and dispersed among the hundreds of thousands of federal prisoners in maximum-security facilities. Those with only tangential connections to terrorist groups can be sent back to their home countries. A third group—those who appear to pose a real danger even though there’s not enough evidence to put them on trial—should be officially classified as prisoners of war, and treated just as German soldiers captured during World War II were, confined in humane conditions until the end of hostilities. The ACLU won’t like the POW solution, and neither will some conservatives. But Obama really has no choice. It’s the best way to balance justice, “humane norms of conduct,” and the safety of the American people.