Obama Administration to Close Guantanamo

The incoming Obama administration has decided that it will close the prison for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It will release some of the inmates, try others in US civilian courts, and establish a special court system to try the rest. The latter is intended to protect national security by preventing classified information from appearing in the public record. One is skeptical that the latter is necessary.

State secrets are, of course, a vital component to national security, and there is a problem with having to rely on such information for a conviction. The Supreme Court in 1953 acknowledged that national security can trump an individual's right to see all of the evidence against him. The trouble there is, documents from the case that set this up, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years. It appears that Air Force officials misled the court, an unfortunate precedent.

However, one gets the impression that the entire point in the case of the Guantanamo inmates is moot. Currently, there are 255 inmates held in Cuba. Most have been cleared to be freed but the US can't find a government that will accept them. Almost all have been there since being captured in Afghanistan back in 2001 and 2002. It is difficult to believe that any of these inmates' cases would turn solely on information too delicate to release in open court at this late date. These men are alleged terrorists, planners of the 9/11 murders. This is quite a different situation than, say, trying a nuclear physicist for giving secrets to the Soviets back in 1955.

This journal believes that the original mistake was made when the Bush administration chose not to treat these captives as prisoners of war. Had that been done, they could still be held as the war in Afghanistan clearly has not ended. Under the Geneva Conventions, these men would be entitled to certain rights and privileges that many might find odious to offer Al Qaeda murderers. On the other hand, one needn't put them on trial and expose state secrets either.

As always, the devil is in the details. A trial in US criminal courts offers the most constitutionally palatable resolution. A separate judicial system runs the risk of undermining human rights. Declaring them POWs at this stage may be too clever by half to convince the world of American earnestness. This journal, though, will gladly support any solution that closes Guantanamo, a stain on America's good name and honor.



© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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