Keeping Guantánamo Bay open damages our national security

Joshua Geltzer wrote an op-ed for The Hill explaining how keeping Guantánamo Bay open damages our national security:

The Trump administration has revived its push to maintain and even increase the number of terrorism suspects held at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, according to a recent report by the New York Times. Trump has already delivered on his campaign promise to halt all detainee transfers from Guantánamo, thus ensuring that the 41 detainees still held at the facility remain there despite government unanimous recommendations to transfer five of them.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson provided bureaucratic insurance to that promise by pledging to eliminate the State Department office charged with seeking to identify receiving countries for those detainees cleared for transfer. The next step, according to the Times, would be to entrench Trump’s position as a matter of law by issuing an executive order formally rejecting existing U.S. policy to pursue the facility’s closure and instead declaring its indefinite operation, including the considerations that might lead new detainees to be brought to Guantánamo.