It seemed so easy.

On Jan. 22, two days after he was sworn in, President Obama issued an Executive Order stating, “The detention facilities at Guantánamo…shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order.”

But yesterday, by a vote of 90-6, the Senate joined the House in refusing the president’s request for funds to shut Guantanamo down until Obama explains exactly how he is going to do it. As Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post: “Lawmakers of both parties spoke out against imprisoning or releasing any of the detainees in the United States.” The vote came less than a week after the president changed his mind and, as the New York Times put it, “decided to keep the military commission system that his predecessor created to try suspected terrorists.”

The president refused to back down on Guantanamo closure today, saying in a speech at the National Archives that the detention facility is “quite simply a mess, a misguided experiment” he inherited from President Bush.

But the truth is that Obama has a huge problem on his hands.

He made a hasty decision to close the Guantanamo facility without considerng what a difficult task he had set for himself, and, in his disdain for all things Bushian, he underestimated certain strong and deep and appropriate American feelings.

Take the task first. Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to want to close Guantanamo. George W. Bush said of Gitmo on June 21, 2006:  “It is my deep desire to end this program.” And, lord knows, he tried. A total of about 800 detainees entered the Guantanamo camp at one time or another over the past seven years. Of those, more than 500 were released and five died (four by suicide, one by natural causes). Roughly 240 remain. President Bush said many times that he wanted to release most of these — that is, the vast majority that would not stand trial. But release them where?

That was the problem that occupied many of the smartest minds of the Bush Administration. I know because, as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, I heard the discussions — over and over. There were three separate difficulties: 1) the home countries of many of the detainees simply refused to take them back, no matter how much effort we applied to convincing them otherwise; 2) some countries might take their citizens back but then (as in the case with China’s Uighurs) might kill or otherwise harm them; and 3) some countries were willing to take the detainees back but were unlikely to keep an eye on them after they returned. This last issue is not trivial. The New York Times reported today that an unreleased Pentagon report found that “one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity.”

To close Guantanamo, then, means to send many detainees to the United States. On American soil, it will be extremely difficult to avoid denying the niceties of American criminal justice to the detainees. And, no doubt, courts will order some of these detainees freed. Again, the question will be where. And one can easily imagine a judge saying, “The U.S. Government detained this person. If his country does not want him back, then the U.S. has an obligation to keep him.”

The matter of how to handle enemy combattants in this war (and, make no mistake, it is a war — they want to kill us, and we want to stop them) is a wickedly complicated one. The idea of Guantanamo was not a bad one. It was American soil, but it appeared at the beginning, at any rate, that detainees would not be entitled to the protections of U.S. criminal law — as they indeed should not, in my view. Court rulings have eroded that rationale.

Even if we did close Guantanamo, we would have to face the same questions in the future: Are Al Qaeda fighters criminals or soldiers? Should we allow them the protections of the Geneva Conventions even if these fighters clearly do not qualify?

Gitmo requires deep thought, not glib pronouncements. It also requires a dose of reality.

I have been to Guantanamo. It was a day trip, and I do not pretend be a penology expert, but what I saw was a clean, well-run facility, where detainees (except the worst of the worse) can commune, take exercise, pray five times a day, eat well, read, learn English, and watch videos (their favorite is “The Deadliest Catch,” about Alaskan crabbers). The food is good (I ate the detainee lunch of meatloaf and salad), and the health care abundant (the doctors told me that, physically and mentally, the average detainee is healthier than the average American). A Beligan anti-terrorist official who visited said, “At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

In fact, whatever Gitmo may have been in the past, the facility’s actual dangers today are the ones to which the guards are exposed: disgusting and deadly “cocktails” that some of the detainees mix from their own feces and urine and throw at the military.

But what about the image that concerns the president and others so much?

Has Guantanamo become a symbol of American brutality and high-handedness? Certainly. Do terrorists kill people because of their rage over Guantanamo? I am skeptical of such alleged motivation. After all, the first World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the bombings of the two embassies in Africa, and 9/11 itself were all perpetrated without the existence of a U.S. detention center for terrorists at Guantanamo or anywhere else.

But are there methods, using the tools of public diplomacy, to address the misperception of Gitmo without releasing the majority of the remaining detainees into America’s cities and towns? I believe so, and in my final months at the State Department, I was addressing that issue, as were foreign service officers in places like Kuwait. It was no piece of cake — in part, because there was resistance at State and Defense to dealing, in a public-diplomacy sense, with Gitmo at all. Better to bury your head in the sand.

The answer, both politically and practically, is not to shut the place down abruptly. Whatever the president said today, I think he is learning that foreign policy and national security — especially as they relate to America’s image abroad — are matters a lot more thorny than they appear from the outside and that to do the opposite of what George Bush did is not a strategy but, in some cases, a trap.

Tags: Guantanamo, Pentagon