No more excuses

NOBODY EXPECTS THE BUSH administration to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center at the request of goody-goodies from the United Nations. But the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture, which called last week for the facility’s closure, isn’t alone in offering that advice. Friends of the United States, such as Britain’s attorney general, have also said so. President Bush should listen to them.

Or to himself. It was Bush who told German television this month: “I very much would like to end Guantanamo.” He couldn’t do that, he added, because the U.S. Supreme Court had yet to rule on the legality of the military commissions that he has established to try some suspected terrorists.

Actually, the president could shut down Guantanamo any time he wants. But even if he had been right in blaming the Supreme Court for the delay, that excuse has a limited lifespan. The justices are expected to rule soon on a challenge to the military tribunals brought by a Guantanamo inmate who once served as Osama bin Laden’s driver.

The Guantanamo facility, where almost 500 prisoners continue to be held, has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. In 2002, when the center was opened, the administration arguably could have believed it might obtain valuable intelligence from the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters confined there. By taking the prisoners to Cuban territory leased by the United States, the administration thought that U.S. law wouldn’t apply.

The Supreme Court disagreed, holding in 2004 that inmates there could challenge their confinement in court. The Bush administration, acting on its own, then devised rules for military commissions that are now before the Supreme Court. Yet only a fraction of Guantanamo inmates are slated to be tried by the commissions, and there is no reason they can’t be confined and tried in the United States.

If that were done, the administration would face the choice of what to do with the majority of Guantanamo’s inmates, who are not targets of military tribunals and who are unlikely at this late date to harbor any useful information.

Many could be returned to their country of origin, as previous detainees have been. Others pose a more complicated problem. Even as it called for Guantanamo to be closed, the U.N. committee warned that inmates shouldn’t be returned to nations where they faced a “real risk” of being tortured. That’s a legitimate caution, but Guantanamo needn’t remain open while the administration puzzles over what to do.

Saying goodbye to Guantanamo would be more than a symbolic change of policy. Confining detainees in a geographically isolated location encourages abuses by authorities and despair and disruption among inmates; witness last week’s detainee suicide attempts and subsequent attack on guards. But appearances are important too. As British Atty. Gen. Lord Goldsmith said in calling for the closing of Guantanamo: “The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, of liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol.”