Powell says it’s time to close Guantanamo

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.

Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when President Clinton began devising the military policy on gays. Called “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy was intended to allow homosexuals to serve in the military only as long as they did not disclose or act on their orientation. In recent weeks, Democratic presidential candidates have urged that the policy be jettisoned.

Powell said the policy was “an appropriate response to the situation back in 1993. And the country certainly has changed.”

But unlike his successor as Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, Powell said he was not yet convinced that the country had changed so much that the system needed to be changed.

At debates in New Hampshire last week, all the Democratic candidates said it was time to move on from the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, while none of the GOP candidates expressed that view.

On the war in Iraq, Powell expressed pessimism about the status of the U.S. effort. Noting that the current strategy is built on three “legs” -- the U.S. military escalation, the attempt to train Iraqi security forces, and the effort to move the country to political reconciliation through changes in its laws and constitution -- he said the most crucial political component “is not going well.”

Though Powell has served Republican presidents, his comments on Guantanamo put him closer to the Democratic field than the GOP.

And Powell, who was urged to run for the presidency in 1996, acknowledged that he had not decided which party to back in 2008 and that he had twice been consulted recently by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on national security issues.

On another issue, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said the United States should consider “aggressive” military action against Iran.

The comment put Lieberman in a minority among U.S. officials.

Though the Bush administration says it will not take options off the table, few U.S. officials are speaking of military action against Tehran because of the risks and costs of a wider war when U.S. forces are already stretched thin.

paul.richter@latimes.com