The Gitmo Report

It would be hard for the current occupant in charge of the Pentagon to be performing poorly relative to the war criminal he succeeded, but Robert Gates is actually impressing me with his mop-up role of trying to restore credibility to this country. For instance, his advocacy of closing Gitmo is noble and consistent.

Congress and the Bush administration should work together to allow the U.S. to permanently imprison some of the more dangerous Guantanamo Bay detainees elsewhere so the facility can be closed, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.

Gates said the challenge is figuring out what to do with hard-core detainees who have "made very clear they will come back and attack this country." [...]

Lawmakers said Thursday the Guantanamo facility hurts U.S. credibility with its allies. They asked that Gates give more thought to how it could be closed and detainees moved to a military prison.

"I hope that we can work to find some way to correct this problem, because as you say, it is a stain on our reputation and we can't afford it," said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.

Of the 385 detainees at Guantanamo, fewer than 100 would be considered hard-core, Gates said. He said he assumes there would be room in the military prison system for them.

Gates inherited this problem and he moved quickly to try and close it down before being outflanked by Cheney and Gonzales. He understands how this black mark has shamed us globally, and also put us in the precarious situation of not being able to prosecute through normal means people who we clearly violated American law and moral principles by torturing and coercing confessions. That can be plainly seen by the sentencing of David Hicks, who will serve only 9 months in Australia for providing support to terrorism, in exchange for a 12-month "gag order" so he cannot talk about his incarceration or what was down to him at Guantanamo. Hicks is a broken human being who would say or do anything to get out of that hell-hole. The idea from the beginning was to keep this facility out of the United States so the prisoners there wouldn't be subject to US law. But this was unsustainable, and ultimately more damaging to the cause of stopping extremism and getting the world behind the righteousness of the American cause.

Gates is to be commended for his effort to do something about this nightmare, though the legal aspect of his ideas ("we should come up with some way to keep them locked up forever because... uh, because") is a little dubious.