The U.S. should not close down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps

I reserve the right to make additional arguments and define additional terms in future rounds of this debate. ====== I affirm the resolution: The U. S. government should not close down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. To support the resolution I offer the following: 1. FISCAL CONSIDERATIONS The U. S. has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building and maintaining the state-of-the-art facilities at Guantanamo Bay (. http://earthnocentric.blogspot.com...). Closing down the detention camp would render the cost of building and maintenance wasted. The Obama Administration has estimated the cost of closing down the detention center and relocating all current detainees to be in the ballpark of an additional $80 million. These costs are simply too high to lose on closing down a fully-functional state-of-the-art detention center. 2. DETAINEES If Guantanamo Bay were to close down, we would face the difficult question of what to do with current detainees. Most current U. S. prisons do not want them; most locations for future facilities on U. S. soil do not want them; European nations do not want them. The Obama Administration has yet to come up with a viable solution for what do with the detainees post-Guantanamo Bay. It would be potentially harmful to U. S. interests to allow enemy combatants access to potential recruits. At least some within the U. S. prison system are disillusioned with the U. S. government due to their imprisonment. The potential for home-grown terrorist organizations; or an alliance between international terrorist organizations and underground criminal organizations in the U. S. (the mafia, street gangs, drug cartels, &ct. ) is too dangerous to risk. The risks (home-grown terrorism) far outweighs any potential reward (improved international reputation) for closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention camps. If the detainees are to be held and kept separate from the rest of the prison population (either in separate/new facilities or a separate wing of existing facilities) then the annual cost of detention would surely be exponentially higher than keeping them in Guantanamo Bay. Of course, we don't know what the cost will be because the Obama Administration has yet to conduct a study to calculate the annual cost. 3. HUMAN RIGHTS The reputation of the U. S. can be repaired in the international community whether the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp remains open or is closed. The simple solution is to cease all torture and unauthorized "enhanced interrogation techniques"; and to treat detainees with all rights usually given to prisoners of war. The problem is not so much that Guantanamo Bay exists as it is our treatment of detainees therein. To repair our international reputation we must follow the rules of the Geneva Convention. ====== CONCLUSION Because the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps are state-of-the-art facilities; and because closing them down would be an unnecessary financial burden; and because no viable plan has yet to surface as to what to do with detainees post-Guantanamo Bay; and because our international reputation can be repaired by alternate means: The Resolution (The U. S. should not close down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps) is affirmed.