WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday the Guantanamo prison camp needed to be closed because it had become "a taint" on the reputation of the United States.
Defending President Barack Obama's decision to press ahead with plans to close the controversial "war on terror" prison at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Gates said in an interview that the detention center was damaging the country's image and served as a propaganda tool for al-Qaida.
"The truth is, it's probably one of the finest prisons in the world today. But it has a taint," Gates said on NBC television's "Today" program during a visit to New York.
"The name itself is a condemnation. What the president was saying is, this will be an advertisement for al-Qaida as long as it's open," he said.
Gates, who also served as defense secretary under President George Bush, said Americans should not fear the transfer of some of the detainees to high-security prisons in the United States, where he said convicted terrorists have been held for years.
"We have many terrorists in U.S. prisons today. This started 20 years ago when I was at CIA and we captured a Hezbollah terrorist who had been involved in killing an American sailor on an aircraft that had been taken hostage in Beirut," said Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
"We brought him to the United States, put him on trial and put him in prison," he said.
Obama's critics are employing scare tactics over the issue, he said.
"The truth is there's a lot of fear-mongering about this. We've never had an escape from a super-max prison. And that's where these guys will go, and if not one of the existing ones, we'll create a new one," he said.
The defense secretary also criticized plans of some members of Congress to try to prohibit the transfer of detainees in Guantanamo to the United States.
"I mean the real issue is, do you close Guantanamo and put them in a prison in the United States in someway, or somewhere, or are you forced to keep Guantanamo open because all the other possibilities are closed off legislatively?"
In a speech on Thursday, Obama vowed no retreat on closing the prison, branding the camp a "mess" and charging that Bush-era anti-terror tactics were rooted in fear and ideology.
Obama also raised the prospect of holding the most dangerous al-Qaida detainees indefinitely in U.S. "super-max" jails.
After he spoke, the U.S. Senate approved a $91.3-billion 2009 budget supplemental to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through Oct. 1 but without funds to close the prison camp.
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