This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 22nd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama is apparently working to make good on one campaign pledge to close Guantanamo Bay.

David Ritgers is a legal policy analyst

at the Cato Institute and is a former Special Forces

officer who served three tours in Afghanistan.

He says closing the facility serves both justice and

the fight against terrorism, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Well his rationale was that Guantanamo has damaged our standing internationally and has made

relationships with our allies more difficult and that's an accurate assessment.

So he made the promise as a candidate to close Guantanamo.

We've seen the beginnings of that process

the day after his inauguration.

First, we've seen that he's asked for the trials of detainees and the military commissions to be halted.

Those orders have been granted by the military judges overseeing those trials.

And the second, there's been the circulation of a draft of an executive order to actually close Guantanamo.

The timeline for that is as soon as practicable, but not more than one year from the enactment

of that executive order. That may be a bit of an ambitious timeline, but

even 18 months at the outside is really what we should be pushing for. So this is an

ambitious and admirable goal.

When people talk about detention, they refer to Guantanamo Bay, and you suggest that that's not really appropriate?

No, and there's an honorable tradition in the military of giving quarter, of taking people prisoner.

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