Time to close down Cuban
prison facility
Tuesday, January 15, 2008 1:42 PM PST
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen declared Sunday what has been a fact for a long time: It is time to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Mullen made his comments while on a tour of the terrorist suspect detention center in Cuba and he made it clear the final
decision on the matter is not his alone to make.
Still, Mullen’s logic is nearly indisputable. When asked why he thought the detention center should be phased out, he said it
was because of the negative image the prison has garnered for America across the globe.
In that summation, Mullen is quite correct.
No other single issue has drawn more criticism and given our terrorist enemies more valuable propaganda than the detention
center in Cuba.
There are extremely complex legal questions swirling around the status of the individuals detained at the Guantanamo Bay
center, but that is a different question from whether the center should be closed.
As a foreign policy, this nation ignored global public opinion for almost all of President George Bush’s first administration and only began to try to remedy the situation and rebuild broken bridges during his second term.
That willful disregard for global opinion has hurt this nation’s status and hampered the wider war on terror.
Instead of building bridges we tore them down and created public affairs nightmares like the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
The center has attracted criticism from allies and foes alike; it has largely become a place with a large, legal bulls-eye on it all
the while the individuals detained there have languished in weird kind of limbo.
Guantanamo Bay has been a public relations quagmire. It has hurt our image across the globe.
It’s time to close it down and come up with a different answer to the detainee issue.
