The Guantanamo dilemma

President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the military prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, as did his opponent Sen. John McCain. But what is he going to do with its inmates, many of whom are highly dangerous? There are no easy answers.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Judge Advocate General officer who now holds the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, is widely regarded across party lines as an expert on military justice. He aptly pegged the Guantanamo dilemma Thursday, telling us:

"The big issue is how do you handle these prisoners. Are they common criminals or are they enemy combatants?"

The senator's answer: "They are enemy combatants who should be tried in military commission setting. They took up arms against the United States. They didn't rob a liquor store."

However, Sen. Graham, like Sen. McCain, agrees that Guantanamo should be closed. He recognizes that the prison has become a public-relations liability for our nation. He advocates moving those prisoners to maximum-security facilities in the United States far from urban settings. "Maybe Fort Leavenworth, but certainly not the brig in North Charleston," he says.

Yet he warns, "Wherever you put them, it will become a high-value target." He also warns that in some cases, trying prisoners now held at Guantanamo as civilian criminal defendants in federal courts would "compromise security" by revealing intelligence sources that gathered evidence.

Sen. Graham proposes letting the military determine if prisoners are enemy combatants — and if they should be tried in military courts. Then, in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling, those decisions by the military could be appealed to federal civilian courts.

Of the approximately 255 prisoners remaining at Guantanamo, more than 60 have been cleared for release but are still being held because the government cannot negotiate their transfer to other countries. Only 18 of the prisoners have been charged with war crimes.

But among the rest, many were captured along with leading al-Qaida figures. Twenty are described as having been bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. At least three others were implicated in the 9/11 plot. Others are accused of participating in al-Qaida bombings of the USS Cole and the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and of planning other such attacks.

And according to Sen. Graham: "We have let more people go under the current system than we still hold. Thirty of them already have gone back to the fight."

Civil rights activists point out that the evidence against detainees does not always meet the standards required by U.S. criminal law because it was collected by military intelligence methods, including stressful interrogations.

But though President-elect Obama has called the current format "an enormous failure," he acknowledges that "there are a lot of dangerous people" at Guantanamo.

The incoming commander in chief should minimize the dangers those people pose by heeding Sen. Graham's advice on how to handle them after he closes Guantanamo.