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Gitmo sunset? Closing the prison won’t be easy for Barack Obama.

As soon as Barack Obama was elected president two weeks ago, the calls starting piling in: Close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. Human rights organizations, pundits, U.S. allies, and much of Congress support the idea, which now looks certain to top the incoming administration’s agenda. “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that,” Obama told Steve Kroft Nov. 16 on 60 Minutes. “I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture. And I’m gonna make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

But shutting down Guantánamo will be no easy task. Of the prison’s 255 remaining detainees, 23 are still facing various charges. Relocating any or all of the prisoners to U.S. soil could prove contentious and legally complicated. To sort out the issues, Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson spoke with Matthew Waxman, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. Waxman, the first ever to hold the position, was appointed after the Abu Ghraib incident in 2004 to advise then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Just over a year later, Waxman left for the State Department, having fought unsuccessfully to extend the protections of the Geneva Conventions to every terrorism detainee.

Foreign Policy: Many in the United States and in the world are hoping that President-elect Barack Obama will close the Guantánamo Bay prison as one of his first moves in office—but it looks like this won’t be so easy. What are some of the legal hang-ups that could postpone closure?

Matthew Waxman: President Obama may announce quickly his intention to close Guantánamo Bay, but I wouldn’t expect it to close overnight. The operational obstacles include some difficult diplomacy with home governments in an effort to transfer or release many detainees under an adequate set of humane treatment as well as security assurances. And there are logistical issues of where to detain [the prisoners] and how to secure them. Of the remaining [prisoners in Guantánamo] whom we intend to continue to detain, presumably [they would be held] in the United States.

It’s another question to figure out on what legal basis to continue holding detainees. There are basically three choices: We can prosecute them in U.S. courts; continue to hold them as enemy combatants; or seek new legal authority from Congress for preventive detention. Each of those has its own subchoices. For example, if you prosecute [a detainee], do you use federal criminal courts, do you use courts-martial, do you use military commissions, or do you go to Congress to create some new courts? I don’t expect Obama’s administration to make any firm decisions on [these issues] until it has had its own opportunity to review the cases and make its own determinations about which can be prosecuted.

FP: Peter Bergen and Ken Ballen, in an article for ForeignPolicy.com, argued that “Most of [the detainees at Guantánamo] have never posed any real risk to America, for the simple reason that the vast majority of them were never ‘enemy combatants’ in the first place.” What’s your reaction to that statement?

MW: I have no doubt that some individuals were brought to Guantánamo who never should have been, but I also believe that some detainees were released under the belief that they didn’t pose a threat, and that [conclusion] turned out to be wrong. Certainly you have some extremely dangerous individuals, including al Qaeda masterminds like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but you also have some lower-level threats and even some individuals who don’t pose a serious threat to the United States and who ought to be returned.

FP: If I were a detainee in Guantánamo today, what would my legal status be? What rights would I have?

MW: The detainees are held as enemy combatants in an ongoing armed conflict. According to the U.S. government, they can be detained until the end of hostilities with al Qaeda. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in the Boumediene et al. v. Bush case, it’s now established that the detainees at Guantánamo have a constitutional right to habeas corpus—in other words, a right to challenge in federal courts the legal and factual basis of their detention.

Many detainees have access to lawyers at this point. There are hundreds of habeas corpus cases that are ongoing—there is very active litigation that is going on now challenging individual detentions. If [detainees] were simply brought into the United States, most of those cases would simply continue forward. If they were prosecuted or held under other legal arrangements, most likely, there would be grounds for other habeas corpus cases, but these would need to be refiled to challenge the detention.