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Tough Spot
U.N. recommendation to close Guantanamo is sound, but it will be hard for the U.S. to kill its monster
Editorial
Houston Chronicle
May 26, 2006
The U.N. Committee Against Torture has declared that the United States should shut down Guantanamo prison. The rationale for this conclusion is obvious: Detainees are held indefinitely and without charges, and they are subject to interrogation methods widely considered to be torture. But shutting down the site engenders its own set of problems.
This week, President George W. Bush and close ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted mistakes were made in prosecuting the war on terror. Bush said his bombastic statements, such as challenging terrorists to "Bring it on," and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison were regrettable. Bush could add Guantanamo to that list.
The U.N. committee urged the United States to stop interrogating by torture, "ensure that no one is detained in any secret detention facility under its de facto effective control," and say whether any such prisons exist. These practices, along with indefinite detention without charges, are per se violations of the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, the committee found.
The committee is tasked with establishing international compliance with the convention, but it has no legal authority to enforce its findings. Closing Guantanamo is a decision strictly in the hands of the administration. But although Bush himself has said he'd like to be rid of the problem, there are obstacles to closure.
One issue is that a number of inmates first detained as suspected terrorists have been cleared but cannot be released because they would be tortured or killed in their home country. Another is U.S. officials' fear that some detainees would take up arms with al-Qaida or the Taliban if released. Some worry that if Guantanamo were to close, its inmates could be transferred to secret lockups, becoming even less visible to human rights intervention.
Guantanamo is a problem of the administration's own making. The Bush team set up the prison in 2002 on the theory that an extraterritorial detention site populated by "enemy combatants" would fall outside the bounds of American or international human rights laws. Federal court decisions have opened holes in that theory, and now the administration is awaiting a judgment by the Supreme Court on whether detainees can have access to military tribunals. In the meantime, the White House has yet to make a convincing argument for why these prisoners cannot be held in the United States and their cases subject to American justice.
The president and his advisers must come up with a solution to their quandary. Holding prisoners without charges and for undefined terms is anathema to the American concept of justice and does a great disservice to this nation's reputation as a refuge of fair-minded judicial review.
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