WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Sunday called for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison and a rethinking of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy he authored as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The public comments represent Powell's effort to further distance himself from the Bush administration he once served.
A key architect of the Pentagon's policy on homosexual troops, Powell said the country is moving away from the attitudes about gays it had in 1993, when the policy was adopted. But he stopped short of calling for a redesign while the country is at war.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Powell urged that the military commission system for accused terrorists be scrapped, and that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be taken to the United States and handled through the federal justice system. The United States continues to hold about 385 people in the detention center, despite the complaints of human rights advocates and other foreign and domestic critics. Their continued imprisonment there, he said, has "shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system."
Responding to defenders of the current system who are reluctant to allow detainees access to lawyers and judicial protections, Powell said, "So what? Let them.... America, unfortunately, has 2 million people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus.... We can handle bad people in our system."
With authoritarian world leaders citing Guantanamo to "hide their own misdeeds," he said, Guantanamo "is causing us far more damage than any good we get from it."
Powell's comments are a step further in his steady evolution as a public critic of the Bush administration he served. Even as secretary of State in President Bush's first term, Powell privately expressed misgivings about the Iraq war and its aftermath. Since leaving the administration in 2005, Powell has made more and more clear his unhappiness with administration policy.
Last September, Powell made a stir by attacking, in a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Bush's plan to handle detainees through military commissions. He wrote that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."
But now, with Bush and the war in Iraq increasingly unpopular, Powell's concerns about the system are shared even within the administration. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, for example, has expressed his preference to move to a different approach.
