Closing Gitmo

As President-elect Obama's inauguration approaches the media is clamoring to know what he will do first. One of those very things it has been said has been to close down the prisons at Guatanamo Bay.

This presents the obvious question of, what will happen to those detainees? From what I've seen there seems to be three options, none of them good, and two especially bad.

1. Send the detainees back to their countries of origin: This could be problematic for a couple reasons. First, there is a real chance that upon returning home they will not serve long prison terms and will eventually end up back on the battlefield to be either killed or captured by US forces. Secondly, there is the prospect that some of these detainees could be executed upon arrival. I doubt an Obama Administration would want to do that. Both cases present problems.

2. Prosecute the detainees in the US: The major issue here is you'd be forced to give them the same rights a US citizen enjoys. In so doing though some of the evidence acquired in interrogations might not be eligible to be used due to just how it was acquired. Plus, intelligence gathering methods would be jeopardized due to such public trials. This would be disastrous. We cannot let the ways in which we protect ourselves be compromised.

3. Military trials: Of the 3 options being floated around this is the best. This would be reserved for high ranking Al Qaeda, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. They could be done outside the US, but still the burden of proof would be high under an Obama Administration. Regardless though, what do you do with these detainees once they've been convicted? No one wants them in their state and the cost to imprison them could be high since it'd have to be in maximum security prisons. So what to do?

As can be seen the options aren't good. How we will deal with it remains to be seen though. Nothing is set in stone and hopefully a President Obama will do what is best for the security of our country.