TW: One way or the other closing Guantanamo needs to happen and will happen. The actual implementation will be tricky. There are only about 260 inmates at Guantanamo creating a symbol of poorly defined justice that needs to be eliminated. Amidst those 260 are apparently 50-100 difficult to place but very legitimate security threats. My suspicion is that one way or the other we can find a way to deal with them short of keeping a symbol of American failure open.
From Economist:
"...disposing of the 260-odd (in every sense) inmates still incarcerated there won’t be easy.
A few dozen are small fish—not to mention innocents—who we could easily send home. But there are some whose governments don’t want them, and others (eg, those Chinese Uighurs) whom their governments might torture or execute. International law says you can’t repatriate them. We’ll ask friendly countries to take a few, but you will end up having to let most go free in the United States. Some might well return to the battlefield after all we’ve done to them. But as General Barry McCaffrey has said (we’ll keep the quote handy), it’s going to be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for 15 years...
Then there are those 80 or so really hard men. President Bush wanted to try them, and could never get the law right...there’s a group the Agency is sure are dedicated terrorists but on whom we have nothing that can stand up in any sort of court. The human-rights purists say you must bite the bullet and set these unconvictables free in America. But if you follow their advice it won’t just be Republicans who will say you are putting the republic in danger...Safer would be to move them to the mainland, where they would be held under some kind of preventive detention"
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12638668
No comments:
Post a Comment