In February 2008, while serving as attorney general, I visited Guantanamo. Before that visit, I found the clamor to close the facility puzzling; afterward, I found it incomprehensible. As a sitting judge, I had had occasion to visit prisons in the United States. Guantanamo compares favorably with medium security facilities run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. While there, I was able to see the high-value detainees, who are monitored on closed circuit television, other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was out of his cell visiting with a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. I took the opportunity to visit his quarters, which included an adjacent exercise room equipped with an elliptical machine that was the same make and model as the one in the gym at the Lansburgh, where I was then living.
The medical care the detainees receive is better than the care their captors receive. There is a library with numerous works of Islamic interest available, as well as a large choice of DVDs, including many in Arabic. The most popular was “Walker, Texas Ranger.”
The only violence at Guantanamo is directed by the prisoners at the guards, who must wear plastic face shields when they approach or enter cells to protect themselves from the cocktails of urine, feces, and other bodily fluids that are regularly hurled at them.
I write this for two reasons. First, when I asked a guard whether there was anything I could do to improve the lot of those who serve at Guantanamo, he asked only that I tell what the place is really like, so I do that whenever the occasion presents itself. Second, I write it in the hope that someone can explain in coherent fashion what it is any rational person thinks we will gain by closing a facility that is remote, secure, and humane, and instead either release those who are held there, whose known recidivism rate exceeds 20 percent, or bring them to the United States where they will then use our courts as trampolines and become totemic figures within the prison system.
Again, I just don’t understand it.