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Interview with Donald Rumsfeld
Larry King
CNN: Larry King Live
May 25, 2006
KING: A couple of other quick things in our remaining couple of moments here. Future of Guantanamo?
RUMSFELD: Well, it's an interesting problem. It's got a bad reputation. It is an exceedingly well run, professional, humane detention center. And the prisoners there are being treated by our soldiers and sailors and marines in a perfectly proper, humane way, the detainees are.
We don't want to be jailer for the world. We don't. We would prefer not to have anyone. We'd like to have all of these people go back to the countries they came from and be dealt with there. Unfortunately, some of the countries we aren't allowed to give them to, because we worry that they would not be treated in a humane manner.
We're trying to get through the courts so that these military commissions can process these people, and each one is reviewed every year to determine whether or not it's appropriate to detain them.
But there are some very vicious, violent extremist people down there who have killed people and who will go -- say they'll go right back out and kill Americans again. And to just turn them loose on the streets, as some people have naively suggested, is mindless. It doesn't make any sense.
So while it's unfortunate that we have to hold them, but in every war prisoners of war have been held. In every war, people who are dangerous, if they got back out on the street, unlawful combatants, have been held, and there's nothing new in this at all. And I wish there were a better answer for it, but I don't know what one is. And I haven't heard anyone come up with one.
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