WASHINGTON - Former secretary of state Colin Powell said Sunday he favours immediately closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to facilities in the United States.
The prison, which now holds about 380 suspected terrorists, has tarnished the world's perception of the U.S., Powell said.
"If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it," he said.
"And I would not let any of those people go," he said. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers . . . So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?"
Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said Congress and the Bush administration should work together to allow imprisonment of some of the more dangerous detainees elsewhere so the military camp at the U.S. navy base in Cuba can be closed.
The Defence Department estimates it would take about three years to conduct 60 to 80 military commission trials, if the administration decides to hold that many.
Some Democrats in Congress have sought to close the camp. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and other legislators have proposed shuttering the camp and shifting the commission trials to the U.S.
Powell said the U.S. should do away with the military commission system in favour of procedures already established in federal law or the manual for courts-martial.
"I would also do it because every morning, I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds," Powell said. "And so essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission.
"We don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get for it," he said.
Powell spoke on "Meet the Press."
