President-elect Obama has hit the ground running and is already preparing plans to close Guantanamo Bay, a move championed by legal scholars (aka elitist terrorist-lovers in some circles) from both parties. But what to do with the detainees?
Under plans being put together in Obama’s camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.
A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.
The actual structure is yet to be determined, but it’s possible that Obama will propose a new court system that will be more transparent than Bush’s military tribunals but will stop short of treating detainees as if they have full constitutional rights. Symbolically, though, shutting down that detention center will be an important message to the rest of the world that America has changed, and it will probably help in building the alliances that Obama sees as essential to stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan.