Gitmo's days are numbered

The Bush administration is moving closer to shutting down its bitterly criticized prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, but the process is being held up by disagreement among his closest advisers, and problems about where to send many of the 370 inmates who remain at the jail, at a U.S. base in Cuba.

Despite a White House statement that a meeting of top officials scheduled for yesterday to take decisions on the future of the facility had been cancelled, it become clearer by the day that the pressures to remove what has become a global embarrassment for the U.S. are now well-nigh irresistible.

President Bush himself has said he would like the prison to close its doors as soon as is feasible, and both Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretaries of Defense and State, have indicated their opposition to it.

Only last Sunday General Colin Powell, Secretary of State when the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, said he thought the facility should be closed and the prisoners moved to jails on the U.S. mainland.

On Capitol Hill, proposals are circulating for the prison's closure, supported not only by Democrats but also by several leading Republicans.

Guantanamo was not merely a problem but "an international disgrace that every day continues to sully this great nation's reputation," Steny Hoyer, majority leader and the second ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, said this week. As the outrage has grown, U.S. officials increasingly find that when they press for greater human rights around the world, their arguments are undercut by critics who point to how prisoners have been held at the prison for up to five years or more without charge, effectively incommunicado and without the right of habeas corpus.

Only last year did legal action finally force the Pentagon to release a list of names and nationality of those detained. But four more suicides in the last 12 months alone, and years of reports of inhumane treatment, religious abuse and harsh interrogation techniques, have sealed Guantanamo's reputation as a place of despair, where the normal requirements of the law and international conventions do not apply.

U.S. officials say the obstacles to simply shutting it down are practical: persuading other countries to take those inmates -- 75 or so -- who have been cleared for release, and finding enough space in secure military jails within the U.S. One possibility is the U.S. army jail at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Another is the U.S. Navy brig at Charleston, South Carolina, where Jose Padilla, U.S. citizen and one-time 'dirty bomber,' was held without trial or proper representation for three and a half years, before those charges were effectively dropped. But even at the brig, room exists only for some 200 prisoners at most, it is claimed. "These steps have not been completed and no decisions are imminent," a National Security Council spokesman said.

However the fate of Guantanamo Bay also exposes a long familiar fault line in the Bush administration, between those like Rice and Gates who want above all to salvage America's reputation, and hardliners -- led, as usual, by vice-President Dick Cheney, backed this time by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the man who as President Bush's first

White House counsel was largely responsible for devising the "enemy combatant" status conferred on the prisoners, argues that to bring the detainees to the mainland would merely lead to a new flood of habeas corpus cases. For their part, homeland security officials worry about housing top drawer terrorists like al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a prime organizer of the 9/11 attacks and transferred last year to Guantanamo, on U.S. soil.

In testimony on Capitol Hill this week, John Bellinger, the State Department's top lawyer complained that although critics in the U.S. and abroad were urging the prison's immediate shut down, they had offered "no credible alternatives for dealing with the dangerous individuals detained there."