Closing Guantanamo: Setting the Record Straight

If you premise your views on cable "news," then you might be mislead to believe that closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is a national security risk. This could not be further from the truth. The first Guantanamo detainee arrived in New York early this morning, and the world hasn't ended yet.

The facts are clear: (1) maintaining an extra-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay is a clarion call for terrorists; and (2) there is no reason to sacrifice American values and permit endless detentions of criminal suspects outside of our nation's laws.

There's been quite the hullabaloo over what to do with Guantanamo detainees. Losing ground on national security issues, conservative politicians have latched onto the closure of Gitmo as one of the few issues where they can play offense. With scare tactics not unfamiliar to students of witch hunts and the Red Scares, conservatives have mobilized waves of NIMBYs with irrational fears and fabricated threats. And congressional leaders seem to have succumbed to the pressure produced, blocking funding of the President's relocation efforts.

For purposes of deciding how to close Guantanamo - a dangerous and persistent black eye to our moral authority around the world - there are two types of detainees presently being held there. The first are those who experts have concluded present no threat to our country. Obviously, they should be freed or prosecuted for any crimes in a court of law. This is the United States of America, after all, not a banana republic.

This brings me to the other type of detainees confined at Guantanamo Bay today: those who remain committed to the destruction of our country. These are menaces that we cannot overlook.

Like other criminals who threaten innocent lives and safety, such as murderers, arsonists and sexual predators, any suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay should be prosecuted with the full force of the law and, if found guilty, imprisoned with the highest degree of security precautions.

We have prisons in our country that serve exactly this purpose. For instance, at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, 473 of the most dangerous prisoners in the world are incarcerated. No one has ever escaped from this facility, including the terrorists already imprisoned there: Ramzi Yousef, who orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; would-be "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; Oklahoma City terrorist conspirator Terry Nichols; and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

Again, no one has ever escaped. And even after years of confinement including the applications of "enhanced interrogation techniques" - which those who know and respect the law call "torture" - no evidence has surfaced that the suspected terrorists are any more clever or adept as escapists than the 340 convicted terrorists already incarcerated across this country. (By the way, torture is not just morally and legally wrong; it doesn't work. It's completely counterproductive, leading to false leads that waste precious national security and intelligence resources.)

The fact of the matter is that America does have plenty of problems with its prison system, but escapes is not one of them. Respect for the rule of law and our own national security interests demand that we close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.