Think it's too dangerous to house the 166 suspected terrorists locked up in Guantanamo Bay within the continental United States? A powerful senator asked a congressional research office to run the numbers. It found that there are no fewer than 104 places inside the U.S. to safely lock them up ' provided they make serious modifications.
President Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo Bay looks deader than Osama bin Laden, thanks to a buzzsaw of bipartisan congressional opposition for the past four years. The reasoning behind that opposition takes a variety of forms, but the thread that unites them is: not in my backyard. 'It's hard to find anyone anywhere who wants his or her state to house the next Guantanamo,' noted Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in 2009, objecting to an administration proposal to relocate the detainees to U.S. prisons, where he presumed they'd be an escape risk: 'Guantanamo Bay is, above all else, secure and safely distant from civilian populations.'
Nonsense, says Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee and a longtime proponent of shuttering the detention facility. As Danger Room first reported last month, Feinstein asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into the practicalities of where to house Guantanamo's detainee population. Its findings, released late Wednesday: The Justice Department operates 98 prisons suitable for holding individuals convicted on terrorism charges; and the military runs six more. But the report also makes clear that it's not as simple as moving the detainees from one holding facility to another: Not only would the law have to change, but non-terrorism prisoners would likely have to be moved, and the federal prisons are already seriously overcrowded.
'This report demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security,' Feinstein said in a prepared statement. 'The United States already holds 373 individuals convicted of terrorism in 98 facilitates across the country. As far as I know, there hasn't been a single security problem reported in any of these cases.'
The GAO study Feinstein requested is rigorously agnostic on whether Guantanamo ought to be closed. Accordingly, it doesn't make any recommendations. And the numerous operational difficulties it highlights for imprisoning the remaining 166 Guantanamo detainees in federal or military prisons show it's not just a matter of pure political will.
Still, the study points to the inherent physical similarities between Guantanamo and federal prisons. Camp Six, for instance, the newest detention center and the one holding some two-thirds of the remaining Gitmo population, is 'designed after the layout of a U.S. county jail, and it consists of eight indoor climate-controlled, two-story housing units that each contain 22 individual cells and one large common area.' Nor is Guantanamo a hub for intelligence anymore: Since the facility hasn't admitted a new detainee since 2006, whatever residual intelligence operations happen at Guantanamo are to 'help ensure the safety and security of the detention facilities and personnel.'
Should the Obama administration opt to charge the detainees with war crimes before a military commission, as it's doing with 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the military has six facilities inside the U.S. built to hold prisoners for longer than a year: three Naval brigs at Charleston, South Carolina; Chesapeake, Virginia; and Miramar, California; the correction facilities at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Lewis-McChord in Washington; and Leavenworth's Disciplinary Barracks. Those facilities, combined, are only 48 percent full. And since the Obama administration has opted to hold 48 detainees indefinitely without any charges, continued military detention might be the easiest path to shutting Guantanamo ' if not shutting down what it represents.
There would be challenges, though. Servicemembers convicted of crimes would have to be relocated to different prisons to comply with a section of the military law that bars 'immediate association' with foreign nationals. And the military's policies for segregating regular military criminals from those detained under the laws of war will present 'capacity limitations' among the six U.S. facilities theoretically capable of taking on the Gitmo population, meaning the military can't 'easily accommodate' its prospective new domestic wards.
The other, more politically controversial option, is to charge the detainees in federal courts and hold them in federal prisons. There, the GAO found 98 prisons operated by the Justice Department that house among them 373 people convicted of terrorism charges. The Department, while swearing it has no plans to move Gitmo detainees to any of them, insists its personnel 'have the correctional expertise to safely and securely house detainees with a history of or nexus to terrorism.' Not a single person convicted of terrorism in federal courts has escaped ' particularly not from the federal Supermax prison in Colorado.
But that's not the whole story. For one thing, Congress would have to repeal laws preventing the Justice Department from taking custody of the Gitmo population. Then come the operational challenges. '[A]dditional procedures and infrastructure would be required governing where and how each category of detainee would be held, including their accommodations,' the study finds. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) personnel have no training for the 'holding of detainees who have not been charged with or convicted of violating U.S. law.' And even for those who are charged with criminal violations, the prisons are already facing a 38 percent overcrowding challenge. 'If BOP needed to confine detainees to single cells, existing inmates would have to be moved to create space for the detainees, which could require that BOP triple bunk some of the current inmate population,' the GAO found. All of that will cost money.
Feinstein's a longtime advocate of closing Guantanamo: In 2007, she sponsored the first Senate bill to do so. But it's hard to tell how this report can generate the 'political will' she identifies as the linchpin for finishing the job. The Obama administration doesn't 'want to spend the political capital' to do so, says Benjamin Wittes, who studies terrorism detentions at the Brookings Institution, and scores of congressional Republicans 'won't say there's anything appropriate to do with capturing detainees except bringing them to Guantanamo.' (Wittes might also have added that congressional Democrats are happy to leave the issue alone out of fear of being called weak on terror.) Unless Obama and Congress can unlock that dynamic, Guantanamo will stay open, GAO study or no study.
But it's also worth noting that Feinstein released the GAO as the Senate debates next year's defense authorization bill, which in recent years has earned controversy for its provisions restricting Obama from closing Guantanamo. Her staff says it's just a coincidence.
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