Welcome to D.U. tirebiter. Nice name!

If the prisoners were just moved elsewhere and treated the same, I guess that would be okay.

Not what "close Gitmo" means to most people, I suspect. They want the prisoners released. Calls for trials get louder when it's suspected that errors of process will make most evidence inadmissible. Then the prisoners will just be released. Thing is, even after looking at the records a diverse set of people have said that there's a small group that cannot be released, trial or no trial. That includes Obama. The inference is that if what they'd done became known and any politician released them, that politician's career would be trashed. So "close Gitmo" = "release all the prisoners" isn't going to happen, unless Obama decides to release them on the last day of his presidency.

Even in 2005 there were a fair number of detainees who had been released, and the US was fishing about to find where they could release many more. (1) Other countries were saying no, even those who had accepted a lot of money or trade perks in exchange. (2) Many detainees had vanished. Some countries admitted this. Others said they'd moved, the country involved had them monitored but wouldn't say where they were. Suspicions were they'd vanished. (3) Some former detainees turned up on the battlefield in Iraq or in Afghanistan. DU had a field day with those. On the one hand, the DU trend was "release the detainees", on the other hand DUers were giddy to be able to say * screwed up by releasing detainees (often with the claim that it was "obviously" the detention that radicalized otherwise sweet, lovable young men picked up on the battlefield with munitions). Note that few detainees have been reclassified from "cannot release" to "can release" in the last 7 years, and finding homes for those who can be released has proceeded at about the same pace since 2009 as from 2006 to 2008.


The trials have been a curse. They haven't happened because as the years-long process of formalizing the process neared its conclusion some lawyer for a prisoner reset the process. Or a new president came along. Most of the time has been spent trying to figure out the process that will meet everybody's requirements.

There's a duplicitous call to just move them to US soil, as though that will satisfy the calls to "close Gitmo." And nothing else will change, the rest of the claim goes. Except that on US soil suddenly the prisoners, all of them, will be subject to habeas corpus and other Constitutional protections that would, well, get them released.

Of course, there's still the contingent that want Gitmo returned to Cuba. Partly because it's a relic of US imperialism, partly because there's a navy base there and US force projection from the geographic center of the US should stop somewhere around Wichita (about 200 miles from the geographic center).