How Would the Candidates Close Guantanamo?

By Jeralyn, Section Terror Detainees
Posted on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 09:10:37 AM EST
Tags: Guantanamo, detainees, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama (all tags)

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All three presidential hopefuls have said they will close Guantanamo. The LA Times examines how it could be done.

Officially, Pentagon officials say there are no plans in hand to move suspected terrorists to the United States if the new president orders it. No official orders have been given to Southern Command, which oversees the prison, to prepare for its shutdown. Such orders would trigger a formal planning process.

But unofficially, midlevel officials watching the campaign pronouncements have begun working on plans -- including examining other sites and estimating the work that would be involved in moving detainees -- in case the next president orders a shutdown.

Possibilities: The military prison at Leavenworth, KS and the South Carolina naval brig.

The detainees would gain greater legal rights if moved to the U.S. [more...]

Limits on rights are specific to Guantanamo, however, legal experts said. If they are moved to U.S. territory, they will be entitled to broader rights to challenge their detention, the experts said.

Because there is little evidence against them that could be used in a U.S. court, government officials fear that a federal judge could order them freed. "Then you would have 100-plus future sleeper-cell members unleashed in Kansas," for instance, said the midlevel official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. "That is what the government is trying to prevent."

Obama's plan:

An Obama administration would work to cut the Guantanamo population by sending detainees to their home countries or prosecuting them, said an advisor, who also was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

"I hope we would not take the historically unprecedented step of creating a detention-without-trial regime until we exhausted every other possibility," the advisor said.

Question: What about those whose home countries would torture them or whose home countries won't take them back? Would Obama free them? Or as I suspect McCain would, hold them indefinitely?

As to Hillary, "Clinton has said she supports a right for prisoners to seek court reviews."

Hillary has supported closing Guantanamo since at least April, 2007. Here's what she said at a Senate hearing.

"Guantanamo has become associated in the eyes of the world with a discredited administration policy of abuse, secrecy, and contempt for the rule of law. Rather than keeping us more secure, keeping Guantanamo open is harming our national interests. It compromises our long term military and strategic interests, and it impairs our standing overseas. I have certainly concluded that we should address any security issues on what to do with the remaining detainees, and then close it once and for all," said Senator Clinton.

At the hearing, she questioned the military witnesses about how to overcome security and legal hurdles in closing Guantanamo. Admiral Hutson responded:

With respect to my good friend Dan Dell'Orto, we've got, one, a red herring and two, a tired old argument. The red herring is the security. We don't have thousands, we've got 385. The United States prison system is easily capable of dealing with those. We have tried, tried to try, two people by military commissions from down there. One was a driver and the other was a kangaroo skinner. Some of them are terrible people, I'm sure. KSM admitted to everything under the sun, but we don't have 385 people that the United States prison system can't one way or another deal with. We've got John Walker Lindh in prison now for 20 years; we got Richard Reid in prison for life without parole. The U.S. prison system can deal with it.

...With regard to the legality, we keep wanting to come up to the edge of Gitmo being a legal black hole and the reason they're there is because laws can't touch them and if you bring them back to the United States, the laws suddenly cover them. The United States Supreme Court has decided that issue. The law reaches down to Gitmo. It is not a legal black hole. So, it is not an insurmountable legal problem for the United States court system, which I testified earlier. We should be trumpeting from the roof tops rather than hiding behind the concertino wire of Gitmo. Let's bring them out, show them the light of day, prosecute them, convict those that need to be convicted and sentence them. Acquit those that need to be acquitted and get on with it.

The next witness to answer Hillary's question was Mr. Smith:

I agree first of all, with the imperative of closing Guantanamo for all the reasons you've said and the reasons Secretary Gates has articulated. It's an impediment to trying to win the broader war on terror and our standing in the world. The security issues we can clearly deal with as Admiral Hutson said. The legal issues, I see no reason why we can't have military commission trials in the United States. I also see no reason why we cannot use the procedures we talked earlier, before your arrival, of beefing up the procedures for the combat statues tribunals. I don't see why we couldn't do that in this country as well. I'm in favor of ultimately restoring habeas corpus once someone has been through the process of a combatant status review tribunals. I don't see why any of that can't be done here. What do we have to fear from this kind of process?

After a few more witnesses answered her question, Hillary concluded with:

I personally believe that in the eyes of the world, Guantanamo is ammunition for our enemies and it is time to close Guantanamo and to deal with both the security and the legal challenges. There is a lot of land in this country that the federal government owns. There is certainly no shortage of capacity to build a special detention center or prison or to use one of the maximum security facilities that already exist.

In June, 2007, USA Today wrote a similar article on how the candidates would close Guantanamo. At that time, Hillary and Dodd were co-sponor's of Diane Feinstein's bill to close Guantanamo while Joe Biden was a co-sponsor of Tom Harkin's bill which called for moving the detainees to Leavenworth and releasing those who had not been charged. McCain also advocated moving them to Leavenworth, but not releasing them.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has not backed either bill though he repeatedly calls for closing Guantanamo and restoring the right of prisoners to challenge their detention. "Ultimately, he supports Guantanamo closing and is still working to find the best possible solution for the prisoners who are there right now," said spokesman Bill Burton, Obama's campaign spokesman.

As to specific plans, USA Today noted last June,

None of the Democrats have specific plans on how to shut down the prison. McCain and Biden advocate moving the Guantanamo prisoners to the military's only maximum-security prison, Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. That might run into a space crunch: The military prison there can hold 500 prisoners and currently has 450 inmates, according to Janet Wray, Fort Leavenworth spokeswoman.

Actually, it wouldn't. There are fewer than 400 detainees at Gitmo. If the military prisoners currently at Leavenworth were to be moved to other prisons, all the Gitmo detainees would easily fit there. We should also be releasing those who aren't charged with a crime.

Unfortunately, a reading of today's LA Times article shows we've made no progress. None of the candidates have come up with a specific plan for how to close Gitmo.

On a related issue, the Military Commissions Act, both Hillary and Obama opposed it. Hillary gave this statement in Sept. 2006.

Here's a recent comparison of the Democratic candidates on Guantanamo and the Military Commissions Act. Here's a recent statement by McCain.

< Obama Rephrases His Regrets About His "Bitter" Remark | How to Read Polls: Part X >

How Would the Candidates Close Guantanamo? | 3 comments (3 topical)

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I think none of the candidates want to be (none / 0) (#1)
by scribe on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 09:34:57 AM EST

specific, because that will open them up to their adversaries using their positions in negative ads. For example:

A McSame ad: "Democrat X wants to bring the world's worst terrorists here, in the United States, give them comfortable prison accommodations and then free them into your communities. If their liberal trial lawyer friends get a chance - and under Democrat X they surely will get chance after chance - you will have crazed suicide bombers stalking your local mall inside of a month of Democrat X taking office and because of Democrat X's proposed policies. Why? Because Democrat X is worried about how the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in sorta-gay France will look down their noses at us for being tough when we need to be tough.
I, on the other hand, will keep these scum in the hell-hole they made for themselves, and keep you warm, tucked-in, and security-blanky safe."

A Democratic candidate: "John McBush wants to keep torturing people, even though they have done nothing, all because he needs to see people suffer in order to keep his aged unit engorged. After all, he feels that if being tortured for years in the Hanoi Hilton can make him president, it's surely good enough treatment for a few other guys from foreign countries. He'll even tell you being tortured will help spread democracy, because torture awakens the democratic instinct latent in people who grew up outside America.
But, McSame is a doddering old f*rt who's full of baloney. It's because of the Bush-Cheney-McSame policy of kidnapping innocent people then throwing them into a dungeon where they get tortured without end that the people who supply your gasoline have raised the prices and made it impossible for you to buy food and drive to work, too. After all, the people Bush, Cheney and McSame are having tortured are distant relatives of the people who own the oil wells. If someone were doing that to your relative, you'd raise the price, too, wouldn't you?"

Get the point?

Guantanamo Bay (none / 0) (#2)
by eleanora on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 09:51:32 AM EST

has got to be job one for the next president. We need to bring those prisoners to the US, give them access to competent lawyers, and charge them with actual crimes in a court of law or let them go. I love how Hillary pragmatically notes that there's only 385 of them, not thousands, and that we can handle them just the way we do other suspected criminals. Her plan sounds good to me, clear-cut and forthright.

Innocent or guilty, the US cannot and must not use fear or "freedom" as an excuse to deprive people of basic human and civil rights. And it's ridiculous that after all these years, habeus corpus is even a question. How are we a civilized nation if we reject one of the basic tenets of civilization?

and this has been the fear (none / 0) (#3)
by cpinva on Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 11:21:39 AM EST

of the bush administration all along:

The detainees would gain greater legal rights if moved to the U.S.

in fact, the better question is: why are they at guantanamo to begin with? whatever crimes they may (and mostly won't) be charged with were committed elsewhere, not in the U.S. they should be tried in the country where the crime purportedly took place.

but, the real fear is that, had they unfettered access to U.S. courts, the complete lack of any substantive evidence against them would become glaringly obvious, adding another notch to the incompetent ledger of the bush administration.