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Here are the five steps the US must now take to safely and quickly remove the stain on America’s reputation

After more than six years of constant controversy, it really does look as if Guantánamo’s days as a prison camp are numbered. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Boumediene v Bush further narrowed any legal distinction between holding the detainees at Guantánamo or within the territorial boundaries of the United States. That - combined with both presidential candidates’ pledge to close Guantánamo - means we can now definitively say we have reached the beginning of the end.

Supporters of Guantánamo are certainly not going to give up easily, screaming at the top of their lungs about all of the horrible things that will happen if we close the prison. Justice Antonin Scalia, for one, charged in his dissent in Boumediene that the Court’s decision “will almost certainly cause more American’s to be killed.”

The reality is that the harm from Guantánamo detainees is not limited to the prospect of violence perpetrated after release. Guantánamo has become a symbol of a rogue American hegemony that disregards the rule of law, even as it uses calls for freedom and democracy as a weapon to assert its influence across the globe. Alberto Mora, the Navy’s general counsel from 2001 to 2006, told Congress last week that “there are serving US flag-rank officers [admirals and generals] who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of US combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

To save American lives, Guantánamo must be closed. It can be done safely. And it can be done in a manner that reinforces the values that Americans have fought so long and so hard to preserve.

Real obstacles to closing Guantánamo do exist, and the next president will have to walk a fine line between the urgency to resolve the fate of many at Guantánamo in limbo for more than seven years and security and political realities that accompany such an emotive issue as the threat of future terrorist attacks. To accomplish these goals, the next administration should pursue a five-phase plan to close Guantánamo:

Phase One: Immediately change the dynamic at Guantánamo by announcing a fixed 18-month timetable to close the prison, and for the remainder of its existence, making it as transparent as possible. These are meaningful actions that signal real change from the Bush administration, yet allow appropriate time to work through all the challenges of getting the Guantánamo prison population down to zero.

Phase Two: Bring a small number of detainees into the United States to stand trial in regular federal or military courts. Scrapping the flawed Military Commissions and rejecting any effort to establish National Security Courts in favor of established US courts will get trials moving faster and is a major step to restore confidence in the legitimacy of America’s actions.

Phase Three: Create a resettlement and rehabilitation programme in partnership with allied countries and international organisations to find homes for detainees that cannot be returned to their home countries, and to smooth the re-integration of detainees into society. This program should be based on similar programmes currently used by the US military in Iraq and the Saudi Arabian government to assist in the transition of militants from detention to release.

Phase Four: After US courts demonstrate their effectiveness and legitimacy, transfer those remaining detainees selected to stand trial into the US. These detainees should be held at either the US Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as the “Supermax,” at Florence, Colorado, or at the US Military Detention Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, depending on whether they are slated for trial in federal or military courts.

Phase Five: Some detainees will remain at Guantánamo who are not candidates for trial, but who were captured during military operations in Afghanistan and may represent a threat to coalition forces still fighting in that country if they are released. Transfer this group back to Afghanistan and hold them in a Nato-controlled detention programme, along with prisoners captured by coalition forces during on-going military operations.

This programme can reduce the population of Guantánamo to zero within 18 months, but problems could arise in one or more of the steps, and the next administration should be prepared for the only two choices available for any remaining detainees: create a preventive detention regime and hold them indefinitely in the United States, or release them.

Choosing the preventive detention route would mean falling at the last hurdle in the long effort to eradicate the festering sore of Guantánamo. Any move to release even what is likely to be only a handful of detainees carries some genuine security threat and will be politically difficult, but it is an acceptable level of risk when measured against the significant strategic gains of the permanent closure of Guantánamo.

Guantánamo is a policy that stands squarely in the way of justice. We can shuffle the likes of Khalid Sheik Mohammed through little more than politically motivated show trials that draw attention away from his grievous crimes. Or we can believe in the strength of our system of government, bring this unrepentant terrorist to New York, and expose him as one of the world’s worst mass murderers in a courtroom near Ground Zero. There would be no better demonstration that although he was able to orchestrate an attack on the US that claimed the lives of 3,000 people, he utterly failed to destroy America and all that it stands for.

Ken Gude is the author of How to Close Guantánamo, a report published this week by the Centre for American Progress. The full report is available here [PDF].

June 26th, 2008 | Category: Boumediene v. Bush Decision, Close Guantanamo, Guantanamo, Scalia |  Print This Post | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL