Washington Post Oped on Guantanamo's Next Ten Years

Here is my contribution to the Guantanamo birthday festivities--an oped in the Washington Post that opens:

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the hand-wringing is in high gear. There have been op-eds by former detainees, a statement by retired military personnel, denunciations of President Obama for his failure to close the site and tear-stained statements by human rights groups. In a decade of policy experimentation at Guantanamo, some efforts have succeeded, some have failed tragically and some are still in process. But far more interesting than the past 10 years is what the next 10 will look like. And that subject seems oddly absent from the current conversation.

The piece proposes what I describe as three principles out of which we might forge Guantanamo's next decade: (1) that Guantanamo isn't closing and that long-term detention isn't going anywhere either, (2) that process-rich detention of the sort that has developed at Guantanamo ought to be available for a broader range of detainees than we currently hold at Guantanamo, and (3) that detention is necessarily a fluid business and that the military needs the flexibility to release people easily from detention when that is appropriate. The piece concludes:

Put these three principles together and you get something — process-rich, flexible detention at Guantanamo Bay — that looks like a detention policy for the coming decade. Working toward such a policy, not endlessly picking at the scab of the past 10 years, should be the focus of today’s discussion.