Kathleen McCaffrey, Associate Editor

Ideology: Libertarian | Writing from: Berlin, Germany

I have never really known my position on Guantanamo Bay. On one hand, it seems sensible to have an entity where suspected terrorists can be interrogated as a means of sifting out information. Our country has avoided attacks since September 11, 2001 and perhaps it has done so through some uncouth methods in exchange for safety. I am reminded of The Supreme Court’s famous declaration in 1866 that “[the Bill of Rights], in truth, are all peace provisions of the Constitution and, like all other conventional and legislative laws and enactments, are silent amidst arms, and when the safety of the people becomes the supreme law.” However, and quite obviously, civil liberties and due process for all is an essential component of upholding a democracy. Within this frame, though, prisoners of war fall in a very sensitive spot of our legal system – as Amnesty International has noted ad nauseam.

I try to be as much of a pacifist as I can and would much prefer not suspending due process, habeas corpus, or, really, any rights for the individual under any circumstances. The early history of Guantanamo Bay seemed like an excessive herding of people that I cannot, or will not, defend. Yet, in recent years, many improvements have been made to the quality of life in Guantanamo, and the number of prisoners that have been tried and released has increased steadily.

That being said, I have made my decision: Guantanamo Bay should be shut down.

What prompts this final say? The UK Telegraph had a very interesting article published on November 1, 2009 titled “Guantánamo suspects want to stay, say officials.” As it seems, it’s not too bad in Guantanamo as far as prisons go. In fact, “the 221 remaining inmates receive between four and 20 hours outdoor recreation in the Caribbean sun and anything from weekly to almost unlimited access to DVDs and receive three newspapers (USA Today, plus one Egyptian and one Saudi Arabian title) twice a week. Every bed has an arrow pointing towards Mecca and every cell a prayer rug.” On top of this, they have a traditional Middle Eastern diet and drink the same water as the prison guards. (They will likely crave this after a nice workout on their new gravel football field.) This is in stark contrast to the 22 ½ hours of solitude they would endure in a 9 x 9 foot cell at a Federal Maximum Security Prison in Colorado if Guantanamo were to be closed down. Human contact would be minimal and exercise would be limited to an hour and a half indoors five days a week.

Upon reading about the conditions in Colorado, I felt a similar degree of trepidation about encroaching on due process. However, I then read that “Since 2005 an Arab American cultural adviser, who for security reasons is identified only by the name of Zak, has been employed at Guantánamo to liaise with detainees. He said that some detainees would rather stay put than go on trial in the US, where they would probably receive a life sentence or could wait years for a death sentence to be carried out.” Any reason a suspected terrorist would want to delay trial is a reason I want him to be deprived of the Carribean sun.

Kenneth Roth of Foreign Policy wrote a very compelling argument to say that it would be in the best interests to turn terrorist suspects over to its criminal justice system rather than hold them in preventive detention in the interests of expedient justice and improving the reception of the War on Terror. Convicted terrorists such as Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Richard Reed went through the courts and the charge of “conspiracy” can apply to both prior and upcoming crimes. On the debated topic of protecting intelligence, Roth noted that “Congress enacted the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) in 1980. The law empowers federal judges to review defense counsel’s requests for classified information with the aim of sanitizing that information as much as possible or restricting its disclosure to only those defense lawyers with security clearance. The purpose of the act is to protect a defendant’s right to confront all the evidence against him or her while safeguarding legitimate intelligence secrets…Judges who have tried cases under CIPA speak of it as a reasonable compromise between fairness and security. CIPA rules have not forced the government to abandon even one of the dozens of international terrorism cases it has prosecuted since 9/11.”

Criminal prosecution would also strip these goons of the coveted “enemy combatant” title. As Khalid Sheikh Mohammed so eloquently put it, “We consider we and George Washington doing the same thing…So when we say we are enemy combatant, that right. We are.” Enemy combatant sounds far more virtuous than “convicted criminal” – much in the way that canceling newspaper subscriptions and football fields for terrorists sounds cheaper than shipping them to solitary confinement (because it is).

I don’t look for excuses to suspend rights, nor do I believe in unjustly detaining people. I especially don’t agree in giving (relatively) luxurious accommodations to legitimate prisoners that have tried to harm the United States. Therefore, I believe we should prosecute these remaining 221 men as soon as possible and, if they are found guilty, have them pay their dues to American society – away from the comforts of Guantanamo.