GTMO: Habeas 'Aint the Only Reason

Ever since the Boumediene decision was handed down a couple of weeks ago, there’s been a lot of talk on the editorial pages calling on the Administration to close Camp Delta (the detainee facility) at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO). While most of these arguments essentially argue that since the legal justifications for holding enemy combatants off shore no longer exist, the facility should be closed. However, while I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s position regarding habeas rights for detainees, the argument for closing GTMO seems to ignore many of the practical justifications for holding enemy combatants in Cuba. To be sure, the legal factors were probably the overriding reason the Bush Administration chose GTMO but they were not the only reasons.

Think about this from a security perspective. Following the September 11th attacks and America’s subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. forces started to take thousands of prisoners during its combat operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. At first, these prisoners were treated the same way the military has always treated prisoners and the captured fighters were kept in makeshift prisons throughout Afghanistan. However, as operations continued, it became apparent that the facilities would not suffice, especially for the more hardened fighters who, instead of laying down their arms and being content with being away from the font lines as most POWs were in World War II, would stop at nothing to effect escape and kill their captors . In late November 2001, for example, a group of recently captured Taliban fighters concealed weapons in a makeshift U.S. detention facility and killed a CIA agent and several other Americans and took over the facility for over a week until they could be subdued in one of the most brutal battles in the Afghanistan campaign. Furthermore, this is not an old phenomenon. Just last month, to cite another example, Taliban forces attacked a Canadian-guarded facility in Kandahar and freed over 800 prisoners in one of the largest jailbreaks in modern history. Thus we need a facility that will get these guys the hell away from the battlefield and is easily defendable.

As a former administration official points out, when Bush & Co. decided on GTMO it considered these things. Not only is the base well defended against a terrorist attack, being nearly surrounded by water, but it’s also situated within an area where U.S. civilians are not exposed or endangered by the enemy combatants’ presence. Any facility that houses detainees will almost certainly be a target for attack. Currently, the only other maximum security prison maintained by DOD is Fort Leavenworth; which boasts an extremely large concentration of personnel, a relatively high civilian population and is located just outside Leavenworth, Kansas. Thus transferring the detainees to Leavenworth could frighten and possibly endanger a large number of US civilians as well as threaten the base, which could prove catastrophic since the fort is considered the intellectual center of the Army. Moreover, Camp Delta has been specifically designed and built from the ground-up to house and care for these individuals at, no doubt, great expense to the American taxpayer. Moving the detainees to another facility would require DOD to either build another prison or institute major renovations to Leavenworth or other detention facilities. Do we really need to build ANOTHER facility? The editorial pages would do well to remember that the law is not the only thing that should be considered before trashing GTMO. Change the policy not the place.