Tortured Arguments

The latest turn in the torture debate -- whether Guantanamo should be shut down -- is yet another distraction to resolving this standoff. There's no question that what happened at Guantanamo is an outrage. The administration has been negligent (at best) in determining who in fact was being held at Guantanamo and in establishing the sometimes shocking conditions under which they were held. But shutting the facility only deals with the people we have already detained, not what to do with those we will detain in the future. The intelligence value of those at the camp, after so many years, is negligible and the government likely knows it. Why else would President Bush have said aloud recently that Guantanamo Bay might be closed?

The "close Guantanamo" campaign wrongly suggests that if we fix Guantanamo, we will have solved the problem. But we will not have solved the problem that the prison poses until we identify the legal limits that the administration must respect in detaining and interrogating future suspects. Even after the last person leaves Guantanamo, there will still be secret CIA facilities, ghost detention facilities and other locales where the targets of the anti-terror effort will be held. That's why we must break the current stalemate over what conduct is acceptable and to whom it may be applied. If we don't, we are dooming ourselves to new Guantanamos, and new outrages, in the future.

There are some hints that Congress may be recognizing that it, too, should rise to the occasion. Democratic Rep. Jane Harman of California has drafted legislation that would regulate interrogations by any U.S. person; some Republicans are now suggesting that they may consider putting legislative limits on this president. These proposals need to be considered seriously by both the administration and its severest critics.

What are the consequences of moving ahead without changing the status quo? Perhaps the consequences will take the form of hardening anti-American sentiments. Many argue that secretly taking suspects to other countries for interrogation, and the mistreatment of detainees at places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, have turned many in the world against us, have bred more terrorists, and have damaged the slim possibility of winning the "hearts and minds" campaign in the Arab world (as if such a campaign had actually started).

But ultimately, the interrogation debates are not about how the world feels about us, but how we feel about ourselves. Do we really believe that the insurgents in Iraq, or the terrorists worldwide, are motivated by our detention or interrogation procedures? Isn't it much more likely that our continuing presence in Iraq, for example, or our failure to provide security for its people, or even our support of autocratic regimes in the region might have more to do with the animosity that we now face there?

So, at bottom, the consequences we should fear most may have less to do with diplomacy. Like every other country, the United States has, in the name of security, made mistakes that we admit only later. What separates us from those regimes we abhor isn't that we never act cruelly. It's that we reject, rather than defend, our departures from our ideals and we actively seek to prevent such abuses from happening again.

That, in the end, should be our aspiration.

Juliette Kayyem, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a former Justice Department lawyer, served on the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999-2000. She is the co-author, with Philip Heymann, of "Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror," to be published in September by MIT Press.