President-elect Barack Obama vowed on the campaign trail to shut down the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay. But he never said what he would do with the prisoners there. What to do with the 250 alleged foreign terrorists at the Cuba prison is the real question facing Obama, experts say. "The words sounds simple, but it's wrapped in some very complex issues," Air Force Col. Mo Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, said of shutting down the prison. "Saying it is a lot easier than doing it."Terrorism experts and two recent analyses of unclassified information on the prison population indicate the men who remain there are either committed, highly skilled al-Qaeda operatives too dangerous to ever free, or Islamists whose native countries would do little to prevent them from rejoining the jihad.
Guantanamo opened in 2002 and once held hundreds of foreigners caught on battlefields overseas or nabbed based on intelligence against them. About 500 detainees since have been returned home. Some were low-level al-Qaeda sympathizers. Other, more dangerous men were released because their home countries vowed to keep tabs on them, according to the Pentagon. Still, the Pentagon has said several of those freed did return to jihad. One man released to his native country of Kuwait blew himself up in Iraq in May, killing six people.
Of the detainees who remain in Guantanamo, about 80 will be tried and either kept there or sent home to serve their sentences. Another 60 have been cleared for release, though the Pentagon has not found countries to accept them. Then there are about 110 men of whom little is known but who, the Pentagon says, may be too dangerous to America and its allies to ever be let out.
Thomas Joscelyn, a terrorism analyst and senior editor of The Long War Journal, has studied public information released by the Pentagon about the remaining Guantanamo detainees. He established four red flags to gauge how dangerous each detainee was: if they participated in an al-Qaeda or Taliban training camp, stayed at special Islamist guesthouses where terrorists are shuttled to the front or to training, participated in recruiting networks across the Middle East or engaged in hostilities in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
Joscelyn found that at least 46% engaged in hostilities, 48% participated in the recruiting network, 60% stayed in a guest house, and 72% attended training camps. These men have knowledge and skills that would be critical to al-Qaeda again, he said. "You have some guys who are a first-order threat," Joscelyn said.
A review by the Brookings Institution found that some of the "Gitmo 110" are eligible for release but have not been freed because their countries of origin are sympathetic to their cause. Hundreds of detainees have been released to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan because the United States has good relationships with those countries and can trust that they will monitor the released detainees responsibly, said Benjamin Wittes, co-author of Brookings' report.
That has left Guantanamo with a disproportionately high number of lower-risk detainees from Yemen, which has not policed its population and serves as an easy gateway for terrorists into Iraq, Wittes said. Wittes cautioned that these men are far from harmless, describing them as "quite committed."
While the Obama transition team did not return e-mails seeking comment, the Pentagon says shutting down Guantanamo means only that another facility must be found. Pentagon spokesman Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon points to Mohammed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Atta had come up on the radar of national security officials well before 9/11 but had not committed a violent act. "What would you have done with them?" Gordon said. "These are enemy combatants who wish to do harm to the United States. Our government has an obligation to protect the public."
Others do not believe the Pentagon or the Bush administration when they call these men a threat. "We simply cannot take any of the administration's claims as true," said Air Force Maj. David Frakt, a defense lawyer who represents Guantanamo detainees. Frakt said many people who attend training camps or join jihadist movements do so sometimes to show solidarity with oppressed Muslims.
Each detainee is given an initial review by a military tribunal to determine whether they're an enemy combatant to be held until cessation of hostilities in the current war on terror. The combatant then receives an annual review to determine whether he is no longer considered a danger and is eligible for release.
Retired Army major general John Altenburg, who once oversaw the Guantanamo cases for the Pentagon, said those reviews are "unprecedented" in war. "In any other country, in any other place, they wouldn't be bothering to make that determination," Altenburg said. "They would just say, 'We've detained them legally and we can hold them.' "
Davis has disagreed, calling the review panels are unfair. He said most of the evidence presented in the review boards is classified and detainees were rarely able to confront the evidence used against them. Davis said the U.S. would be enraged if one of its soldiers were held under such conditions. But the Bush administration has said that U.S. soldiers are entitled to special treatment as prisoners of war because they follow the rules of war. They wear uniforms and answer to a command structure and a nation. Those in Guantanamo are not soldiers but terrorists who violate the rules of war by pretending to be civilians and targeting civilians, it says.
Altenburg said no matter the debate, the global war on terror will not end with the Bush administration and Obama will need to figure out what to do with captives in this war. "We can detain people that we apprehend in that war as long as the war is still going on," he said. "That may be 10 or 20 years."