From The Washington Post
By Matthew Waxman

In July 2005, I joined a group of senior policymakers at the White House for a review of administration policies on the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As we shuffled into the national security adviser’s West Wing office, televisions nearby flashed with the ghastly news of a massive London subway attack that had the hallmarks — coordination, skill and murderous imagination — of an al-Qaeda strike. As the news sank in, one senior White House official spoke up. “It seems to me,” he declared, to my astonishment, “this meeting is now irrelevant.”

Yes, the ongoing threat of terrorism is very real, but it does not follow that we must keep Guantanamo Bay open — or even that the prison helps our fight against al-Qaeda. It did not occur to that official that the previous four years’ worth of experience might offer lessons that would help us revise the U.S. approach to detaining suspected foreign terrorists. But they do.

President Bush has said publicly that he would like to see Guantanamo Bay closed, if he could do so without putting Americans in greater danger. He can, and he should. My experience advising former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on these issues has convinced me that there’s a way out, but it will take some painful truth-telling to get there. For even if Guantanamo Bay could be defended in legal or moral terms, it still hurts us more than it helps us in battling al-Qaeda.

I’m not trying to challenge the improvised decision to create Guantanamo Bay’s detention site in 2002. Rather, I want to challenge its continued operation in 2007. Fair-minded people can differ over whether the Bush administration was justified in sending suspected al-Qaeda fighters there immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, but as time wears on, it’s almost impossible to argue that the prison is keeping us safer.

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