Republican Urges Closing Guantánamo Facility
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
KEY WEST, Fla., June 11 (AP) - Senator Mel Martinez of Florida said Friday that the Bush administration should consider closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Martinez is the first high-profile Republican to make the suggestion.
"It's become an icon for bad stories, and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio," Mr. Martinez said at the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors/Florida Press Association convention. "How much do you get out of having that facility there? Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?"
Mr. Martinez, who served in President Bush's first cabinet and is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made his comments after Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, suggested that the prison, which houses terror suspects, be shut down.
Mr. Bush said Wednesday that his administration was "exploring all alternatives" for detaining the prisoners.
Human rights groups and former detainees say prisoners at Guantánamo have been mistreated. The Pentagon said last week that some American personnel there had mishandled prisoners' copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
That disclosure followed a report in Newsweek, later retracted, that American investigators had confirmed that a guard had flushed a prisoner's Koran in a toilet. The White House blamed that report for violent protests in Muslim nations.
Amnesty International called the facility "the gulag of our time." Former President Jimmy Carter has also said the prison should be closed.
Mr. Martinez, who strongly supported Mr. Bush's efforts in Iraq during his campaign last year, also expressed concerns about progress in the war. "I am discouraged by how long it has taken for us to begin to draw down some forces," he said at the convention.
He said he had had to write many condolence letters to the families of Floridians killed in Iraq. "It brings home the importance of the decision to send men and women to go to war," he said.
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