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By Root 1910 0

Abdul Rashid Dostum captured three hundred Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers, they took their prisoners to the fort. On Sunday morning, November 25, 2001, two CIA officers went to the complex to question the prisoners, meeting with a group of them in an open area outside the cells. Almost immediately one of the officers, Johnny Micheal Spann, found himself surrounded. The prisoners overcame him in a vicious attack, “scrabbling at his flesh with their hands,” according to eyewitness accounts, and killing him with weapons they had smuggled in. Spann became the first American combat death in Afghanistan. His companion, a CIA agent known only as Dave, managed to escape the next day. It took two days and heavy American airpower to put down the riot at Qala-i-Jangi.

Many of those being captured in Afghanistan were clearly cold-blooded killers who had committed horrific acts of savagery and welcomed a fight to the death. We needed to find a secure place to hold them away from the field of battle. Defense Department officials settled on the idea of a detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they had space and support. It was a choice dictated in part by Justice Department advice that keeping detainees off U.S. soil would prevent them from having access to U.S. courts. Holding detainees at Guantanamo also avoided the security concerns that would arise from bringing them into the United States.

In the years since the first enemy combatants were moved to Guantanamo, the facility there and the U.S. servicemen who guard the detainees have been the target of a tremendous amount of unjustified criticism from people with little knowledge about the actual conditions at the camp. It is a model facility—safe, secure, and humane—where detainees have access to television, books, newspapers, movies, their choice of a number of sports and exercise activities, the Koran, healthy food that is in keeping with their religious beliefs, and medical care. It likely provides a standard of care higher than many prisons in European countries where the criticism of Guantanamo has been loudest.

President Bush determined early on in the War on Terror that even though neither al Qaeda nor Taliban detainees qualified for POW status under the Geneva Conventions, the United States armed forces would as a matter of policy treat detainees humanely and “in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” And that remained our policy throughout our time in office.

Critics often point to the determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees as evidence of our lack of respect for the Conventions. It seems to me to demonstrate the opposite. Geneva is intended to provide protections to those who abide by the laws of war, and among the most important of those is keeping civilians safe. Terrorists intentionally attack civilians, thus putting themselves outside the realm of those whom Geneva is meant to protect. Further, an important incentive to abide by the laws of war is removed if protections are extended to the most egregious violators. When President Reagan rejected a proposal to extend Geneva’s protections to terrorists, he rightly observed that doing so would “undermine humanitarian law and endanger civilians in war.”

During our time in office, the State Department responded to criticism, particularly from Europe, by looking for ways to shut down the facility. In meeting after meeting we debated Guantanamo. My view was always that it was a safe, secure, humane facility, and we had no better alternative for holding dangerous terrorists. We did in fact move many detainees through Guantanamo and returned some to their home countries. We later learned that a number of the released detainees ended up back on the field of battle, fighting against us and our allies in the War on Terror. By the time we left office, the detainees still remaining in the camp were among the worst of the worst—those too dangerous to be allowed to leave and those whose home countries would not take them back.

It was against this backdrop