Above photo: The president vowed to close Guantanamo Bay. (Paul J. Richards / AFP/Getty Images)
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is coming up on its 12th birthday. That will be 12 years of indefinite detention without charge or trial for 90 percent of the detainees held there and almost $5 billion wasted on the facility. That is almost $500 million spent in total and more than $2.87 million spent per detainee for 2013 alone.
But there is cause for hope that we can soon stop tallying the injustices and mindless spending at Guantanamo. Michigan’s own Sen. Carl Levin has long been a strong advocate of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and this year led the way to include strong Guantanamo transfer provisions in the final defense spending bill for fiscal year 2014 that just passed the Senate late Thursday night.
These provisions now on the way to the president’s desk will help facilitate the transfer of the 80 men already cleared for release — but still held at Guantanamo due to Congressional red tape and the nearly 70 others who have never been charged with a crime. Though more work remains, we should all be proud of Levin’s accomplishments this year toward ultimately shuttering the detention facility.
Specifically, Levin’s bill clears away the administrative hurdles that had needlessly complicated efforts to transfer even those detainees that had been cleared. Under earlier transfer protocols, the secretary of defense was prohibited from transferring any detainee from Guantanamo unless he met onerous certification requirements. So onerous, in fact, that under that protocol only six of the detainees slated for release by the Obama administration had been successfully transferred to their home countries. In its place is a more sensible system that will minimize any risks related to transfer while allowing the military the flexibility needed to finally execute transfer orders.
Levin’s bill represents a radical departure from Congress’ past position on Guantanamo. For the first time, Congress is making it easier, rather than harder, for the Defense Department to close Guantanamo — and this win only happened because Levin worked with both the White House and Department of Defense in shepherding the language to final passage.
This language in Levin’s bill has received wide support from national security leaders and from elected officials. Before key votes on the Guantanamo provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel as well as the attorney general and director of national intelligence all wrote to the Senate to urge passage of Levin’s language. Even Senate Republicans, including Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., came out in opposition to amendments that would water down the provisions. With their help, the Senate soundly rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., that would have continued the existing restrictions that have sustained the detention facility.
As Levin said on the floor of the Senate last month, “Gitmo is expensive, inefficient, damaging to U.S. international standing, harmful to our allies’ ability to cooperate with us, and serves as a recruiting tool for extremists.” We could not agree more.
We believe strongly that the senator’s hard-fought language in the Senate version of the NDAA must be followed by additional Congressional action and by leadership from the White House. Levin has opened a path towards justice for half of the population at Guantanamo, and we look forward to continued work on behalf of the rest of the Guantanamo population.
We are proud of Levin for charting a course to ultimately close the detention facility and support him in the work that lies ahead. It is just this diligence that will be required to finally put an end to the extreme cost and the moral bankruptcy of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay.
Kary L. Moss is the executive director of the ACLU of Michigan.
