The five-year-old military prison at Guantánamo Bay, with its indefinite detention rules, lack of judicial review and insufficiently regulated interrogation techniques, is an ugly stain on this country’s long tradition of respect for the rule of law and an endless propaganda bonanza for America’s enemies. Yet it is clear that despite the good advice of friendly foreign leaders, members of Congress and even his own cabinet officials, President Bush has no intention of closing the facility unless Congress forces him to do so.
This week, Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation aimed at doing just that. Her bill would shut down the Guantánamo prison and transfer the 385 or so people still held there to more conventional, and accountable, detention facilities, either for trial in the United States or repatriation to their home countries, with assurances that they would not be tortured or otherwise mistreated.
Senator Feinstein’s initiative is as welcome as it is long overdue. It deserves passage by a bipartisan, veto-proof majority.
Previous Congressional efforts on Guantánamo, like the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, only made matters worse by limiting judicial review and retrospectively legalizing lawless executive branch behavior. By contrast, the Feinstein bill strikes at the heart of the problem. It would begin moving most of the Guantánamo detainees back into the time-tested procedures of the normal American legal system.
Many of those held at Guantánamo may not be dangerous terrorists at all, but people scooped up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere to be sorted out later. Most have been jailed ever since. The only way to determine who should continue to be held and who should not is through genuine trials, not dubious military commission proceedings, which produce implausibly wide-ranging confessions or plea deals that exchange early releases for pledges of public silence.
It is hard to see how such results serve justice or the urgent need to identify and root out currently operating terrorist cells.
