Decision Points

an inconvenience, but I felt it was worth it to prevent a copycat attack. I knew my policy was being implemented fully when Laura’s eighty-two-year-old mom had to take off her shoes before her Christmas flight from Midland to Washington. I sure hoped I wouldn’t be nearby if they asked Mother to do the same.
    The near-miss over the Atlantic highlighted a broader gap in our approach to the war on terror. When Richard Reid was arrested, he was swiftly placed into the U.S. criminal justice system, which entitled him to the same constitutional protections as a common criminal. But the shoe bomber was not a burglar or bank robber; he was a foot soldier in al Qaeda’s war against America. He had emailed his mother two days before his attempted attack: “What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief.” By giving this terrorist the right to remain silent, we deprived ourselves of the opportunity to collect vital intelligence on his plan and his handlers.
    Reid’s case made clear we needed a new policy for dealing with captured terrorists. In this new kind of war, there is no more valuable source of intelligence on potential attacks than the terrorists themselves. Amid the steady stream of threats after 9/11, I grappled with three of the most critical decisions I would make in the war on terror: where to hold captured enemy fighters, how to determine their legal status and ensure they eventually faced justice, and how to learn what they knew about future attacks so we could protect the American people.
    Initially, most captured al Qaeda fighters were held for questioning in battlefield prisons in Afghanistan. In November, CIA officers went to interrogate Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners detained at a primitive nineteenth-century Afghan fortress, Qala-i-Jangi. A riot ensued. Usingweapons smuggled onto the complex, enemy fighters killed one of our officers, Johnny “Mike” Spann, making him the first American combat death in the war.
    The tragedy highlighted the need for a secure facility to hold captured terrorists. There were few options, none particularly attractive. For a while, we held al Qaeda detainees on Navy ships in the Arabian Sea. But that was not a viable long-term solution. Another possibility was to send the terrorists to a secure base on a distant island or U.S. territory, such as Guam. But holding captured terrorists on American soil could activate constitutional protections they would not otherwise receive, such as the right to remain silent. That would make it much more difficult to get urgently needed intelligence.
    We decided to hold detainees at a remote naval station on the southern tip of Cuba, Guantanamo Bay. The base was on Cuban soil, but the United States controlled it under a lease acquired after the Spanish-American War. The Justice Department advised me that prisoners brought there had no right of access to the U.S. criminal justice system. The area surrounding Guantanamo was inaccessible and sparsely populated. Holding terrorists in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was hardly an appealing prospect. But as Don Rumsfeld put it, Guantanamo was the “least worst choice” available.
    At Guantanamo, detainees were given clean and safe shelter, three meals a day, a personal copy of the Koran, the opportunity to pray five times daily, and the same medical care their guards received. They had access to exercise space and a library stocked with books and DVDs. One of the most popular was an Arabic translation of
Harry Potter
.
    Over the years, we invited members of Congress, journalists, and international observers to visit Guantanamo and see the conditions for themselves. Many came away surprised by what they found. A Belgian official inspected Guantanamo five times and called it a “model prison” that offered detainees better treatment than Belgian prisons. “I have never witnessed acts of violence or things which shocked me in Guantanamo,” he said. “One should not confuse this center with Abu Ghraib.”
    While our humane treatment of Guantanamo detainees was consistent with the Geneva Conventions , al Qaeda did not meet the qualifications for Geneva protection as a legal matter. The purpose of Geneva was to provide incentives for nation-states to fight wars by an agreed setof rules that protect human dignity and innocent life—and to punish warriors who do not. But the terrorists did not represent a nation-state. They had not signed the Geneva Conventions. Their entire