As the dawn of the Age of Obama approaches, the president-elect is moving to distance himself from the former president as quickly and easily as possible. What better way to spend his first day in office than by closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which for so long has been a symbol of the ongoing war on terror?
It won't be a simple case of pulling the plug and shipping everybody off on their merry way, though. Even though Obama has promised to move quickly, the legal framework of the action will probably take months to work out, especially the logistics of figuring out where to put all of the detainees.
While some are screaming, and have been for some time, for the closure of the Guantanamo prison, others are stuck wondering what will become of the approximately 250 detainees who are still there â€" too many of whom have been held for years without trial.
Some may end up in far-off prisons in Portugal, and others might receive all-expenses-paid vacations to detention centers throughout the rest of Europe.
But what about the Geneva Conventions? And, lest we forget, habeas corpus?
Those hardly seem to matter when you look at the grand scheme of things. The men have a place to sleep, and they get fed. Isn't that enough?
Maybe we'll hear more claims of Obama pallin' around with terrorists because of his decision, even though Sen. John McCain proposed the same exact thing. But how terrifying can these so-called terrorists be?
Any glimpses we get into the world of the Guantanamo prison show subdued men either walking from one place to another or leaning up against fences. They certainly don't seem like murderous masterminds, but that may just be a part of their clever ruse to trick us into caring for them as human beings.
One of the detainees considered to be among the most dangerous is said to have trained in the fine art of making detonators out of Sega game cartridges. Put this man on trial at once, I say!
Anybody willing to do something so heinous as to use relics of our childhood against us deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest. If his little terrorist buddies are as bad as he is, Guantanamo must be a horrid place indeed.
Lawyers for these detainees have stated that the government simply will not be able to justify the detention of many of the men held there.
If these detainees are offered trials, will they prove what has been feared for quite some time, and will these men be free to go?
In a move straight out of an old Western, have the good guys in white rounded up the local gang â€" only to find out that those rounded up had no business being behind bars?
It seems that only time will tell. Until then, maybe we should bake them a cake with a file in it. As for what will be done to the prison once it is closed, well, perhaps Cuba could use an amusement park.
Naudia Jawad is a journalism graduate student. Her column appears on Wednesdays.
