Former US secretary of state Colin Powell has said he favours immediately closing the Guantánamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to US jails.
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell
The prison, which now holds about 380 suspected terrorists, has tarnished the world's perception of the United States, Mr Powell said yesterday.
"If it was up to me, I would close Guantánamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it," he said.
"And I would not let any of those people go," he said. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers . . . So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?"
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said Congress and the Bush administration should work together to allow imprisonment of some of the more dangerous detainees elsewhere so the military camp at the US Navy base in Cuba can be closed.
The Defence Department estimates it would take about three years to conduct 60 to 80 military commission trials - if the administration decides to hold that many.
Mr Powell said the US should do away with the military commission system in favour of procedures already established in federal law or the manual for courts-martial.
"I would also do it because every morning, I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantánamo to hide their own misdeeds," Mr Powell said.
"And so essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantánamo open and creating things like the military commission.
"We don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get for it," he said.
AP