Wrong call on Guantanamo

This is excerpted from an editorial by The Washington Post.

After boasting during his presidential campaign that he would “load” up the Guantanamo Bay prison with “bad dudes,” President Donald Trump refrained during his first year from sending terrorism suspects to the notorious facility in Cuba. He appeared, to his credit, to have absorbed the central lesson of Guantanamo’s history since early 2002: that holding and trying detainees there is far harder and more time-consuming than in the U.S. federal court system, even as it exposes the United States to damaging criticism from allies and easy propaganda victories for enemies.

Since Trump took office, at least two foreign terrorism suspects have been brought to the United States and charged in federal courts, including one militant accused in the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

It was disappointing to hear Trump renew his commitment to Guantanamo in his State of the Union address.

If he is serious about sending prisoners to Guantanamo, he will be repeating one of the most conspicuous errors of the war on terrorism. In dispatching more than 700 detainees to Guantanamo, President George W. Bush incited a storm of international criticism, handed a recruitment tool to al-qaeda, and failed to bring the authors of the 9/11 attacks to justice.

The Trump administration is right to seek to detain terrorist leaders where possible, interrogate them and put them on trial. If it tries to do so at Guantanamo, it will quickly become mired in new legal problems.

Trump spoke vaguely of asking Congress for new legislation; if that means seeking explicit authorization for military action against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, it would be a step forward. But Congress should not facilitate a self-defeating return to detentions at Guantanamo.