US:Former US secretary of state Colin Powell has said that he would close down the US military prison for enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, "this afternoon" because it has become a major problem in "the way the world perceives America".
"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 a military commission," Mr Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Making it clear that he "would not let any of those people go", Mr Powell said: "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our more federal legal system."
He said that he saw no problem in detainees having the right of habeas corpus and getting their own lawyers. "Isn't that what our system is all about?"
Mr Powell was the only member of President George Bush's first-term "war cabinet" who argued against the detainee policies that said the United States was not obligated to abide by the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of enemy combatants.
Opened in late 2001 for suspected terrorists apprehended in Afghanistan, Guantánamo now has about 385 prisoners. They have no right to file habeas corpus petitions under a law signed last year, but they have their status reviewed annually by a military panel.
Last week, two military judges ruled that the first trials of Guantánamo detainees by military panels could not go forward because the detainees had not been classified as unlawful enemy combatants. The defence department is appealing the ruling.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Powell also said: "We didn't prepare ourselves well enough for the kinds of challenges that occurred in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad."
He said that he and Mr Bush were aware of the post-war problems the US would face, issues addressed in a CIA analysis seven months before the war. "We were liberators for a moment," Mr Powell said, "and then we simply did not handle the aftermath."
He described the burning and looting of government ministries as the beginning of the insurgency. Turmoil went on, he said, because "we didn't have enough troops there to restore that order nor did we have the political understanding of our obligation to restore that order".
Mr Powell said there was a sectarian civil war in Iraq "that ultimately will be fought out between Sunnis and Shias, Shias and Shias, Sunnis and al-Qaeda".
He declined to say that he would support the Republican Party nominee for president next year, saying he would back "the best person I can find". When he joined the party in 1995, Mr Powell said it had moved too far to the right and he would work to bring it to the moderate centre. But he has never been closely involved in party politics.
He said that he had not ruled out returning to public service and had no current favourite in the presidential race. "I make myself available to talk about foreign policy matters with whoever wishes to chat with me," he said in response to a question about two meetings he had with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.