INSIDER INTERVIEW

Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:59 AM

What Happens When Guantanamo Closes?

President Obama is set to sign executive orders today calling for the shutdown of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. But in a recent interview with NationalJournal.com's Mary Gilbert, the Brookings Institution's Benjamin Wittes explained that closing Guantanamo is more complicated than simply shuttering the doors: The new administration must decide what to do with the approximately 250 prisoners still held there, as well as lay out a policy for what the U.S. should do with future "enemy combatants" captured on the battlefield of the war on terror.

Read the complete interview here. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.

NJ: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both advocated closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, yet it will still be open when Barack Obama is inaugurated. Why has shuttering Guantanamo been so difficult?

Wittes: If it were easy, it would've happened already.... It hasn't happened because there are some significant and profound obstacles to doing it. And broadly speaking, they are the following: One, a certain group can't be sent home who we would like to send home, and other countries won't take them.... Two, we have so far failed as a political and legal culture to create a trial system that has shown itself capable of handling more than a small number of these people in a criminal process. Three, irrespective of how effective our trial system is, there is probably some group of people there who are too dangerous to release and against whom a criminal case is not plausible. And four, if you bring detainees to the United States, you lose the benefit, as a government, of certain legal arguments that currently inhibit the release of detainees into the general population of the United States....

If you take those things together, you have a pretty significant set of barriers, some of which... you can work through and some of which it's less clear how easily you can work through.

NJ: How long will it take for the new administration to close Guantanamo? What is a realistic time frame?

Wittes: I assume that most people, when they say "close Guantanamo" they're using it as a proxy.... They're talking about ending a certain approach to detentions in the war on terrorism and replacing it with something. They're talking about something a little bit more grandiose and significant than simply moving people from one detention site to another.... And I don't even know how to talk about it in terms of a time frame. You talk about it in terms of a list of things that you would have to get done, a list of tasks, a process, a bunch of issues that you would have to sort through.