Keep Guantanamo prison open until it's unneeded

President Barack Obama has sent a proposal to Congress to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba in order to make good on a campaign promise and one of his first acts as president in 2009.

He should bet on that pledge remaining unfulfilled.

Indeed, Obama has about as much chance of getting his wish on Gitmo as he does in getting a vote on a Supreme Court nomination before he leaves office. Ain’t gonna happen.

First, even though Gitmo is down to 91 inmates from the 242 there when he took office, a Democratic Congress wasn’t with him in 2009, passing a law to prevent the transfer of detainees to U.S. soil, and a Republican Congress is not with him today. Forty-six of those including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9-11 attacks, are considered too dangerous to transfer back to their home countries and cannot be prosecuted in U.S. courts. Unless Congress revokes those laws, they can’t be brought to federal prisons here. Where else to put them?

If the U.S. is going to be at war, with little sign of that abating given the rise of ISIS, it needs a place for captives — even though we’ve had more of a take-no-prisoners approach during the Obama administration, with an accelerated use of drones that have their own moral questions. Gitmo is safe and convenient.

Meanwhile, closure does not have the support of most Americans, who in polling have consistently been against by a margin of two to one, even though the president is correct that Gitmo’s establishment was not compatible with American values, that it has probably fueled enemy recruitment efforts and has been costly to taxpayers. As far as Gitmo being “viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law,” that may be so but the horse has bolted the barn on that score, with our good reputation unlikely to be restored anytime soon regardless.

We’re about where we were five years ago on this, when there was first discussion of turning Thomson Prison in northwest Illinois into a federal prison that would also take Gitmo detainees.

While we never bought into the fear-mongering that there would be escapes and al-Qaida members lurking in nearby cornfields, hatching plans to attack and rescue their pals — in fact convicted terrorists are housed in our federal prison system now, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev in Colorado — if all that would be changing for the detainees would be their zip code, why expend the money or take the risk of moving them? As far as the president issuing an executive order, its constitutionality in this situation is highly questionable and we are not fans. What mattered most then and what does now in dealing with these dangerous people is not the place but our performance — our treatment of them as measured against our most cherished principles.

Early on — with 779 enemy combatants sent to Gitmo since 2002 — this nation failed in that latter regard. Gitmo should have been declared a prisoner-of-war camp subject to Geneva Conventions rules. We didn’t do that because it wouldn’t have permitted the torture this nation’s leaders shamefully ordered, the benefits of which have largely been discredited since. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling in 2006, that situation has been corrected, and as such we can continue to tolerate Gitmo, until we are no longer at war and no longer have a need for it.

— Gatehouse Media News Service. This editorial originally appeared in the Peoria Journal Star.