Guantnamo Bay was where George W. Bush went to avoid law, both international and domestic. President Bush detained terror suspects on murky authority in the U.S. military enclave at Cuba’s tip, and that is where he would have tried them had the U.S. Supreme Court let him proceed. Bush’s military commissions were first struck down in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld 2006, for denying protections guaranteed by the U.S. military code and the Geneva Conventions; and then again, after the commissions were authorized in new form by Congress, for violating the constitutional right to habeas corpus review, in Boumediene v. Bush 2008. Friend and foe alike came to see the inmates’ orange jumpsuits as the emblem of Bush’s executive overreach.
Closing Guantnamo is therefore a gimme for President Barack Obamaand the executive order to close it within a year comes as no surprise. Yet shuttering Gitmo only begins the debate over what to do with terrorism detainees.
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