Goodbye, Guantanamo

It looks like the Bush administration has decided to turn the lights out on the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. On Wednesday, the president said "We're looking at all alternatives," and on Thursday Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said the U.S. would prefer to have the detainees imprisoned in their home countries. Maybe they haven't made up their minds, but if they had made up their minds, this is exactly what it would look like.

And it's about time, too. Terrorists are dangerous, but so is a practice of holding people without charges and without lawyers and without evidence and without end.

Unless there is some kind of procedure or trial, the American public has no way to know how many of the Guantanamo prisoners are really terrorists and how many of them are the Afghanistan equivalent of Richard Jewell. Maybe that can be tolerated for a while, but the administration has said they will be there for the duration of the war on terrorism, and the war on terrorism has no end.

The courts may uphold all of this as part of the president's constitutional powers as commander-in-chief during wartime. But if we're going to talk about the Constitution, it should be noted that the power to declare war belongs to the Congress. The framers went to a lot of trouble to make sure that one man did not have the power to take the country into war.

Many Americans are concerned about a situation in which the president decides that we are at war, the president decides to hold enemy combatants indefinitely without charges, and the president decides when the war has ended and the prisoners may be released. If President Bush closes Guantanamo, he deserves a lot of credit for being one of those Americans.



Copyright 2005