Federal Trials for Guantanamo Detainees

This week President Barack Obama moved to close Guantanamo and Secret CIA "black site" detention facilities around the world. It was a monumental and overdue statement that our country respects law and justice, even for people accused of seeking to do harm to our citizens. Under George W. Bush's administration, we had allowed Guantanamo to become a symbol of our disrespect for international law and our Constitution. By singling out the worst of the worst and attempting to hold them beyond the rule of law, we achieved the opposite and harmed the reliability of the strong cases we had against many of these people.

Obama is moving quickly to restore the rights of enemy combatants, and presumably bring many of them into the federal court system for fair trials under our Constitution. If we can prove them guilty, we will do so. The party that built Guantanamo and endangered the prosecutions of the very people it tried to disappear is grasping for a wedge. They think they've found it with the old "Not in My Backyard" argument.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who's been doing his share of dishonest grandstanding in the three full days since Obama took office, wrote to Obama saying he didn't want the detainees moved to Texas. (Usually, Texas is more than happy to fill those prison cells, but these guys are just too scary I guess.) The New York Times today has more NIMBY reaction from Republicans in Congress, including the suggestion by Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri that the detainees be moved to Alcatraz (another symbol of extreme punishment and isolation, now a national park and not really ready for prisoners).

These guys just don't get it. The problem with Guantanamo was its prominence and isolation. There are only 245 detainees left - those for whom prosecution is still possible after the Bush bungling should be moved into the federal prison system, which is usually pretty damn good at locking up lots of people and keeping them there. The same politicians who are so scared of detainees escaping and being casually released built a prison system that currently houses two million Americans. It can handle 245 more.

How will our federal courts and prisons handle those transfered from Guantanamo and CIA black sites? Probably just fine. The biggest hurdle in prosecuting these folks will be all of the evidence rendered inadmissible by the Bush administration's mass-botching of prosecutions. I am all for convicting actual terrorists and wanna-be terrorists of crimes if they committed any. At the same time, people held because their name is similar to that of a criminal, or because we got bad information about them, should be acquitted or freed. Our system of justice is designed to separate the guilty from the innocent, demanding that the state presents the evidence it has in order to hold people in prison. It doesn't always work, but it's the best system we've got and I suggest we use it.

Glenn Greeewald at Salon has a thorough review of how federal courts will absorb these defendants, and cites a few examples of guys like Richard Reid and John Waker Lindh who have been prosecuted and imprisoned successfully by our federal system (both are currently in the federal supermax at Florence, Colorado pictured below). Let's move these prisoners into our federal system and move forward with prosecutions - if it's possible to undo all of the baggage these cases carry from the last administration.