Washington – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday he favors immediately closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to U.S. facilities.
The prison, which holds about 380 suspected terrorists, has tarnished the world’s perception of the United States, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow but this afternoon. I’d close it,” he said.
“And I would not let any of those people go,” he said. “I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system is all about?”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said Congress and the Bush administration should work together to allow imprisonment of some of the more dangerous detainees elsewhere so the military camp at the Navy base in Cuba can be closed.
The Defense Department estimates it would take about three years to conduct 60 to 80 military commission trials, if the administration decides to do that.
GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said he believes the prison should remain open.
“It’s more symbolic than it is a substantive issue, because people perceive of mistreatment when, in fact, there are extraordinary means being taken to make sure these detainees are being given, really, every consideration,” said Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor.
“But I’ll tell you, if we let somebody out and it turns out that they come and fly an airliner into one of our skyscrapers, we’re going to be asking, how come we didn’t stop them? We had them detained,” Huckabee said on “Late Edition” on CNN.
