The Obama administration has clearly made little progress towards its goal of closing the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s easy to see why. Closing Gitmo poses an extraordinarily complex legal dilemma. At bottom, there are no good options. Anything short of proper criminal trials for Gitmo prisoners treads on the spirit if not the letter of U.S. law. Allowing trials risks seeing known terrorists go free on legal technicalities sure to arise in courtrooms because of the Bush administration’s unthinking approach to detaining suspected terrorists.
I tend to think the best (or least bad) option is to put the roughly 30 hard-core Gitmo inmates on trial in federal courts and either release the rest or hand them over to their home countries. This is not a popular idea I gather by the recent congressional vote on the issue. But it’s the only option I can see that would empty Camp X-Ray while trying for some sense of justice for 9/11 and other acts of terrorism at the same time.
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About the Author
Since 2001, writer Mark Kukis has traveled widely throughout the Middle East and South Asia to report on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq. Kukis has written for TIME, the New Republic and Salon. Before that, Kukis was a White House correspondent for United Press International. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
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My chief concern regarding the trial of detainees is a fundamental matter of finding the proper forum. While U.S. federal district courts often try cases in international litigation, including foreign claims of human rights abuses, the detainees represent unique cases, with unwieldy evidentiary and procedural problems. While I haven't seen any details of the plans, President Obama's proposed revamped military tribunals seem to strive for a good balance of fairness to the detainees against U.S. national security. In fact, they initially have the feeling of an administrative agency, albeit one fraught with profound, high-stakes issues. Or the hypothetical hybrid courts alluded to in your November article.
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