This is encouraging:
President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers.
It's unlikely the detention facility at the Navy base in Cuba will be closed anytime soon. In an interview last weekend, Mr. Obama said it would be "a challenge" to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration.
But the order, which one adviser said could be issued as early as Jan. 20, would start the process of deciding what to do with the estimated 250 al Qaeda and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held there. Most have not been charged with a crime.
Closing Gitmo actually, as Jeralyn says "ain't rocket science." This has been a meme pushed hard by current military and intelligence types in their ongoing effort to maintain the status quo, including keeping Gitmo going and using the flawed and unconstitutional Military Commissions to try those prisoners. As Jeralyn notes, both the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU have pointed out that it's really not that difficult of a process.
According to the just issued CCR report (pdf) on Gitmo, of the 250 prisoners who remain:
Most can be returned to their home countries through vigorous diplomacy. A smaller number need to be offered protection in the United States or third countries, many of whom have already begun to come forward to offer help to the new administration. There is no justification for continued detention without trial or the creation of special courts; such proposals would continue the human rights disaster rather than end it.
The ACLU concurs:
Each detainee's case must be reviewed by the new Justice Department. If there is evidence of criminal conduct – and one would hope that, after all these years, the government with its vast resources in the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA and FBI would have collected untainted evidence against those detainees it claims are dangerous or guilty – detainees should be prosecuted in our traditional courts, which are the best in the world and fully capable of handling sensitive national security issues without compromising fundamental rights. If there is not, detainees should be repatriated to countries that don't practice torture. Fundamental and transformative change is neither incremental nor tentative.
We have a robust legal system in this country that is more than capable of making these determinations and of trying any of the detainees whose cases merit it. We are going to have a stellar State Department that will be able to conduct the vigorous diplomacy that the CCR calls for. The goodwill the rest of the world already has for President-elect Obama and for Senator Clinton should have us already half-way there. So this process should not only be ordered in the first week of the Obama presidency, but begun in the first week.
There is, however, a rub: could all of Specter's posturing on the Holder nomination be the one thing that prevents the President-elect's Justice Department from tackling this immediately?
Additional discussion about the issue is going on in tuneresq's recommended diary.