Finally! After seven long years, the Obama administration has ordered that the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay come to an end. A mere two days after his inauguration, President Obama signed several executive orders to close the facility within the year, terminate the CIA’s coercive interrogation program, and commission a policy review for the detainment and questioning of terrorist suspects in the future.

Shutting down Guantánamo is a giant step. But, as we have learned so dearly in the past, decisive action calls for a coherent exit strategy. More crucially, the United States and its allies need a new game plan for handling international terrorist suspects—a strategy that jives with both human-rights concerns and a stronger commitment to multilateral counterterrorism.

First and foremost, the United States must immediately figure out what to do with present and future detainees. And, yes, there will be future detainees—unfortunately, the global war on terror is not a myth of the Bush administration. It is part of the often-violent tension between the forces of rapid globalization and modernization and people who want to stay rooted in their own ways of being in the world.

So long as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, anything that any group—especially the United States military—does with regard to its prisoners will make waves for global security policy and conflict prevention strategies. For that reason, post-Guantánamo detainment must be approached in a much smoother and cautious fashion than similar hot-button issues have been in the past.

The United States has a vested interest in collaborative action when deciding where to move the detainees. When possible, it should transfer prisoners to their countries of origin or other states to diffuse responsibility and rescue its old reputation for diplomatic teamwork. Of course, not all of the prisoners can return home for fear of mistreatment and torture: 17 Chinese Uighurs, Libyans, and Uzbeks captured by bounty hunters come to mind.

But, in these exceptional cases, there may be other options. Several European Union states, chiefly Germany and Portugal, have voiced support for the idea of accepting detainees in the EU. Moreover, the possibility of increased cooperation has numerous benefits, including the creation of a double sense of solidarity. A shared transatlantic commitment to responsible, humane detention should balance a firm promise to fight terrorism on all fronts.

Some human-rights advocates have called for the 250 prisoners at Guantánamo to be immediately charged or released. Unfortunately, this is overly idealistic and unlikely to happen. Nevertheless, they should not all be held indefinitely. If evidence has been provided against a detainee, she should be brought to trial. International law dictates that the United States can hold captured combatants without trial until the end of an armed conflict. But, since the global war on terror is itself indefinite in scope and duration, the best option is to prosecute suspects in either U.S. courts—where they can still be convicted of conspiracy and judges may still decide they are too dangerous to release—or regular military courts if they are actual combatants, regardless of their nationality.

President Obama has stated that in place of “military commissions”—controversial bodies that have flouted habeas corpus and other legal principles—he would prefer prosecutions for detainees in U.S. federal courts or in the regular military justice system. But this preference is not a substitute for firm policy: The use of military commissions should be explicitly and permanently forbidden, and, at some point, someone must be held accountable for the unconstitutional use of such kangaroo courts by the Bush administration.

If we are to learn from history, if the United States is to salvage its international reputation, and if some kind of answer is to be given to the Muslim world, the Obama administration cannot simply absolve the Bush administration of its sins. There must be an investigation—both at the national level and at least some semblance of cooperation with the investigators appointed by the International Criminal Court. In any case, the Obama administration should remember that human rights and global counterterrorism are interconnected issues. After all, as New York Times writer Patrick Tyler stated at the onset of the invasion of Iraq, there are, in fact, still two world superpowers: the United States and world public opinion.

Last week, during her tour of Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted the difficulty of pressing China on human rights violations in Tibet in the face of an economic crisis. In any case, it’s likely that China will do nothing at all for the Tibetans. Neither is Russia likely to curb its abuses in Chechnya.

Given these depressing circumstances, why should the United States consider it a moral imperative to include collaborative counterterrorism and human-rights concerns as major tenets of its foreign policy? Or, to paraphrase the cynics, is the United States about to climb back up on its moral high horse? I sure hope so. Even if we’re judging by solely our own standards, after eight years of secrecy and lies, some integrity would nice. Let’s start by approaching the aftermath of Guantánamo in the right way.



Raúl A. Carrillo ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.