CLOSE DOWN GITMO

The prison at Guantanamo Bay has long been a national disgrace. The current mess over how to try suspected terrorists in improvised special courts highlights the need to shut down this facility.

President Bush ordered the creation of the detention center in Cuba after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He wanted a place to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. But he muddied the water by stripping them of basic legal and human rights, setting the stage for aggressive interrogation that has sometimes amounted to torture, and persuaded a docile Congress to suspend the classic right of habeas corpus, under which, for centuries, a prisoner must be brought before a magistrate to challenge the authority for continued restraint.

The Supreme Court threw out the first law as violating the terms of the Geneva Conventions. That treaty binds all signers, including the United States, to provide all prisoners of war trials “by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

The high court found the proposed courts and the suspension of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional because they went beyond congressional authorization. The Bush administration tried to make the system acceptable to the court by rushing through Congress the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which the Senate passed 65 to 34, with Sen. Susan Collins voting for it and Sen. Olympia Snowe not voting.

The Supreme Court at first refused to hear an appeal of a lower-court decision upholding the law but later agreed to hear it. Sharp questioning in oral arguments in January strongly suggested that the court will again throw out much of the special court system. A decision could come soon.

In the meantime, the courts at last are preparing to try their first cases in six years (except for a single adjudication of David Hicks, an Australian, sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for “material support to terrorism” after five years in custody). Charges have been filed against seven detainees, but not one of them has yet met his lawyer. Lawyers involved in the cases expect that few of them will come to trial before the end of the Bush administration.

No one should doubt that some of the detainees are dangerous people. Two of them are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said to have confessed to planning 9-11 and other terrorist attacks, and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden. Only 60 to 80 of the present 275 prisoners are expected to be tried. For the rest, the only plan is indefinite detention without trial.

The prison camp has become such an embarrassment that President Bush and most of his top aides, as well as all three presidential candidates, say they want it closed. If the president won’t do it, Congress, which helped create the mess, should close the prison camp so that the detainees can be tried in regular U.S. courts or returned to their home countries.