Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [304]
In a conventional war, detention issues would have fallen under the responsibility of the military commanders in each theater of operations. But CENTCOM commander Franks was reluctant to have hundreds of those captured remain in the theater as his command’s responsibility. There were no existing satisfactory Afghan prisons that he could use, nor were there easily discernible front lines behind which detainees could be safely held. The rebellion at the Qala-i-Jangi prison demonstrated the challenge vividly. Additionally, Franks and I agreed that frontline American troops would be better used for counterterrorism missions than as prison guards or interrogators.
I thought it preferable to have Afghanistan take on the responsibility of holding detainees captured on its soil. Then, with our assistance, Afghans could begin to seek the swift transfer of non-Afghans to their countries of origin for detention there.34 If a limited number of detainees were going to have to be in U.S. custody, I preferred to hand over major detention responsibilities to another department or agency. Suffice it to say that there were no departments of the government eagerly coming forward to assist. Another possibility I considered was to create an entirely new entity with the explicit purpose of administering detention policy and operations, running tribunals and trial proceedings, negotiating with other countries around the world for the further detention of individuals, and coordinating competing interagency interests. There was no enthusiasm for this approach either, and DoD was selected.
President Bush’s November 2001 military order provided for the detention of enemy combatants “at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense outside or within the United States.” To comply with the order, a number of locations were discussed, including some in the United States. The crumbling federal prison on Alcatraz Island or the maximum security Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were considered. So were other possibilities—such as a ship that could be permanently stationed in the Arabian Sea and island military bases in the Pacific and Indian oceans.35 Attention then turned to the U.S. military facility near the southeastern tip of Cuba.
Christopher Columbus sailed into the narrow stretch of bay named Guantánamo on his second trip to the New World in 1494. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a treaty with the Cuban government establishing the U.S. Navy base on Cuban soil, and leasing the land for two thousand dollars annually. I traveled to the sleepy base twice in the 1950s, as a midshipman aboard U.S. Navy battleships, and later as a naval aviator for training. With palm trees and beaches, the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, or “Gitmo” as it was called, was a low-key facility used to refuel and resupply Navy ships and aircraft patrolling the Caribbean.
When asked by journalists why Gitmo was chosen to house detainees, I described it as “the least worst place.”36 Grammar aside, the phrase conveyed my uneasy feelings about the entire detainee dilemma. We had made the best possible choice among a number of unattractive options. It was chosen because it was far from the ever-shifting battlefield in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops had to guard against the possibility of enemy assaults and attempted escapes. It was controlled entirely by the United States military, even though it was not then subject to American legal jurisdiction. It had some existing infrastructure, including a naval hospital. Its use would not further complicate diplomatic relations with a host nation, since our relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba were poor at best.
Additionally, Guant