President Biden's decision to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan is a significant step toward extricating the United States not only from its longest war, but also from a massive national security architecture defined by the threat of foreign terrorism.
He should now take the next step and close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Its costs to America - both reputational and financial - are exorbitant, and the facility remains a recruitment tool for extremists and a blot on our national character.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has spent trillions of dollars fighting foreign terrorism and built a formidable counterterrorism apparatus aimed at that threat. I remember returning to government in 2015 as President Barack Obama's special envoy for Guantánamo closure, 14 years after I left the National Security Council's counterterrorism directorate in the weeks before 9/11. I was shocked by the bureaucracy of thousands of government employees built around Guantánamo, just one small component of the global war on terror. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent annually to maintain the facility a short distance from our shores.
Mr. Biden must also take a close look at the enormous resource commitment that prevented another 9/11-like attack on the United States and reduced the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations. The large, unwieldy federal counterterrorism bureaucracy must be trimmed. Resources and diplomatic expertise should be redirected to counter today's most pressing geostrategic threats, such as those posed by China. The increasing threat from domestic extremism deserves more attention, as well; it has been far more lethal to Americans in recent years than foreign terrorism.
Guantánamo is a remnant of the era now finally ending. The threats to U.S. security surrounding its creation no longer exist, and the remaining detainee population is increasingly geriatric and unlikely to return to the fight. (The oldest detainee is 73 years old.) The facility is crumbling, necessitating the recent relocation of high-value detainees from one building to another.
Mr. Obama has said that his failure to take decisive action to close the facility at the beginning of his first term was one of his most significant regrets. His administration did come close to doing so, transferring out of U.S. custody virtually all the detainees the U.S. government determined were eligible to leave at that time. Yet efforts to close Guantánamo were hampered by a transfer ban, approved by Congress as part of a defense-spending bill and signed by Mr. Obama despite his misgivings. The law purports to restrict the transfer of the facility's detainees to the U.S. mainland for any purpose. The legislation is of dubious constitutionality because it infringes on the president's constitutional powers as commander in chief to make operational decisions concerning wartime prisoners as he sees fit - a point Mr. Obama made.
President Biden must order the remaining detainees out of Guantánamo despite the transfer ban. Forty detainees remain, including 12 who are subject to military commission proceedings or have pleaded guilty. The remaining 28 could be transferred out of U.S. custody, subject to the negotiation of suitable security arrangements with other countries, including possible foreign prosecution.
Six detainees have been approved for transfer and should be released from U.S. custody immediately. For the remainder, it's hard to remember why some of them ended up in U.S. custody, or why they should remain there. Consider the Kenyan detainee Abdul Malik, suspected of committing two terror attacks against Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002, killing 13 people. These were horrible acts of terrorism, but ones that neither targeted Americans nor took place on U.S. soil. Nonetheless, he has been held at Guantánamo for 14 years. He should be prosecuted in Israel or Kenya. Other detainees are also subject to the criminal jurisdiction of other countries or could serve U.S. sentences abroad. The United States should not be the world's jailer of first or last resort.
Those who cannot be transferred out of U.S. custody at this time, including detainees awaiting military commission trials, should be moved to the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., or to military bases in the U.S. or abroad. The federal prison system has an unblemished record in securely incarcerating those suspected and convicted of acts of terrorism, and at far less cost than the over $13 million per detainee per year at Guantánamo. (It costs around $78,000 annually to house an inmate in a supermax.)
The United States is finally leaving Afghanistan. We should also finally close Guantánamo. As with ending the war, that will be possible only with the boldest presidential leadership.
Originally Published by The New York Times
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