The Economist on Embracing Guantanamo

The Economist has run a thoughtful and interesting column on my idea that President Obama should embrace Guantanamo. The column contains a few factual errors. It attributes this argument to my book, Detention and Denial, whereas it in reality postdates the book. It was, rather, my reaction to the recent congressional restrictions on transfers from the base. It also describes me as someone who "argued until recently in favour of closing Guantánamo." This is not accurate. I have never argued either for or against closing the base--arguing instead that the focus on facilities was a misplaced distraction from designing good detention policy. To be clear, I was never a supporter of closing Guantanamo, and I am not now an opponent of closing it. With those quibbles, however, the column nicely encapsulates my current thinking on the subject:

To be sure, Mr Obama has many excuses for failing to keep his promise. Hardest is the puzzle of what to do with the remaining inmates, a question that became more complicated in December when Congress passed legislation barring the use of Defence Department money to transfer any of them to the mainland. But the point remains: here is a president who continues to espouse a policy he seems unable or unwilling to implement for the time being. Well, if Mr Obama is not really going to close Guantánamo, Mr Wittes says, he should stop pretending he is. He should also face the fact that Guantánamo has improved. The prisoners there have access to lawyers, and the federal courts oversee habeas corpus cases. Such cases are followed closely by journalists, hundreds of whom have visited Guantánamo. There have been no serious allegations of abuse for a long time. Naturally, the regime of detainee rules and rights could be improved. But so long as the big fight is between the closers and the keep-it-openers, America fails to address the really vital question of what rules it should observe when—and wherever—suspected terrorists are held. Concentrate on making it better So here is his proposal. Mr Wittes would like Mr Obama to say that since Congress has made closure impossible, he will work to make Guantánamo “a symbol not of excess, not of lawlessness and evasion of judicial review, but of detention under the rule of law”. In addition, he should commit himself to bringing to Guantánamo all the counter-terrorism detainees America captures anywhere in the world whom it means to hold in military detention for a protracted period, thus ensuring that they benefit from the legal standards established at Guantánamo Needless to say, this argument has fallen flat with civil-libertarians. Most say that the government should either put prisoners on trial or let them go (except for those seized on the battlefield, who could be held under the normal rules of war until the conflict ended). This is principled and neat—and the position this paper has taken. The problem is that, like Mr Bush, Mr Obama seems to have concluded that some of the people in Guantánamo cannot be convicted in a criminal court but are nonetheless too dangerous to free, maybe ever. If Mr Obama does think that, closing the place would be a symbol, but a hollow one if America simply creates a less transparent Guantánamo somewhere else. Better, perhaps, to get the present one right.