How baffling is this opening paragraph from an article in the New York Times about how closing Guantánamo has receded into the background?
WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.
Guantánamo has never been the issue for me that it’s been for some others. I’ve always thought that the problem wasn’t the location but the situation. What do you do with a bunch of captured unrepentant violent radical Islamists? If you release them, they’ll be free to return to their previous activities and, make no mistake, those who are now being retained there are either genuinely bad guys or poor souls who have no future outside of Guantánamo. Repatriating the latter group is signing their death warrants. Changing the location won’t change that situation. There is no good answer and, clearly, the Obama Administration has found it to be the case just as the Bush Administration did before it.
President Obama could close the detention center at Guantánamo tomorrow by executive order. Then he’d have to pay whatever political price was exacted for his decision.
And that’s the real problem with closing Guantánamo rather than political opposition or competing priorities. You’ve got to be willing to pay the political price and heretofore President Obama hasn’t been willing to do that.
Note that I’m not arguing that President Obama should close Guantánamo. I think it’s as good a place as any for those being detained there, I thought the Bush Administration erred in any number of ways in dealing with prisoners taken during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you can’t put toothpaste back into a tube.
What I think is that the White House should either stand up for what it believes in and have the courage of its convictions or sit down and shut up.
Update
James Joyner comments on the same story:
The bottom line is that this is just very hard. It’s debatable as to whether the Bush Administration should ever have transferred jihadists and alleged jihadists from Afghanistan to Gitmo. But, once they did, reversing it became very difficult.
There is an alternative, which is to declare them legal POWs and hold them as such until the war in Afghanistan is over.
My least favorite alternatives involve bringing any detainees to U.S. soil, either for trial, detention or imprisonment. Any of these steps would increase the likelihood of them obtaining a right to American citizenship at the end of their sentence or the end of the war in Afghanistan.
And I am certain that I can randomly pick a hundred names from the Guatemala City phone directory that would make better citizens.
“Any of these steps would increase the likelihood of them obtaining a right to American citizenship at the end of their sentence or the end of the war in Afghanistan.”
One of co-bloggers writes about citizenship issues. IIRC, this is actually very unlikely if he is correct. I occasionally scan through English versions of Arab newspapers and an ex co-blogger was a linguist who used to post Arab cartoons. They certainly see Gitmo as unjust and prejudicial against Muslims. We could hold them just as safely in a couple of US prisons and remove Gitmo as a rallying point. Other than some pants wetting by a few pols, I see little downside, even if we just keep up the indefinite detention.
Steve
And many Muslims see Jews as literal blood-suckers. Something like half of all Muslims live in countries with state-owned and controlled presses and state-funded imams who preach against us on a weekly basis. We’re not going to influence what they think one way or another by what we do over here.
If we close Gitmo it should be for strategic reasons not for symbolic reasons that largely consist of wishful thinking. I think it’s more of a domestic political symbol than one that will make people who aren’t predisposed to think well of us look on us more favorably.
The fact that a judge has already ruled that Gitmo detainees should be released into the United States suggests that this is not an unlikely concern.
The reason the detainees were sent to Gitmo in the first place was in reliance on a pair of SCOTUS decisions: one involving military detainees in Allied China during WWII, and the other involving asylum seekers from Haiti intercepted and brought to Gitmo. These decisions endorsed the view that Gitmo could be used as a detention facility without having to answer to domestic laws.
The SCOTUS ruled that the GWOT detainees brought to the U.S. had contacts with the domestic front that were of a different nature and extent than these precedents and therefore they had acquired additional rights. The more contact these detainees have with our domestic law, the more rights they will acquire until there is no reason not to grant them amnesty, either because the purpose for their detention is over or their criminal sentence has expired.
“And many Muslims see Jews as literal blood-suckers. Something like half of all Muslims live in countries with state-owned and controlled presses and state-funded imams who preach against us on a weekly basis. We’re not going to influence what they think one way or another by what we do over here.”
I know you read history. How many wars off the top of your head used important symbols to help motivate people to fight? Symbols are very important. Now, I guess you could make the case that Gitmo is so well ingrained into the Muslim psyche that it does not matter anymore. I am not so sure, as I still see references to Muslims trapped in Gitmo without trials in some Arab publications.
I think PD’s concerns are overblown, but then we are in unknown territory. I see little upside to keeping it open.
Steve
You’re not following me. We have virtually no ability to control the message that people in the Middle East or in Pakistan receive. Whatever we do they will receive the message that their state-controlled media give them. If we close Gitmo, it will be slanted against us. If we keep it open, it will be slanted against us. Most of the people of the Middle East and Pakistan have never seen an American and never will. They don’t know nothin’ but what they read in the newspaper. Scratch that since the literacy rate is so low. Radio, television, imams preaching. We can’t influence any of them.
” If we close Gitmo, it will be slanted against us.”
How? This is where we will differ a bit I suppose. When you give out obviously false propaganda, it eventually catches up with you, especially in the digital age. As it stands now, we have hundreds of Muslims being held at Gitmo with no charges. That is a fact. We have thousands of pictures of prisoners in hoods. We know people died there under odd circumstances. People were tortured. It is a place with a Devil’s Island reputation. I will confess that I am influenced by Boyd’s general thinking that, roughly stated, winning the moral battle is most important in a conflict.
If we shut it down, it loses its power as a symbol. Can it still be claimed that we hold people w/o charges? Yes, but it is a claim made w/o the emotional appeal of that symbol. Remember how much Abu Ghraib energized out of country jihadists to enter the battle in Iraq? Take these guys to US prisons and start some trials. That positive message will leak out, and will give our information ops guys something to work with, though I will concede it may be too late.
One final question because this always intrigues me.
“What do you do with a bunch of captured unrepentant violent radical Islamists?”
These guys have had no trials. Some were brought in on bounties. How do we know who is really a bad guy and guilty? How do you compartmentalize this, ie, government cannot do anything right when it comes to economic policy, yet they are 100% correct on who should be kept indefinitely w/o ever having a trial?
Steve
Forgot.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/27/another-gitmo-detainee-is-rele
Steve
I agree w/ Dave on the vague value of shipping people to a place that will get nicknamed Mainland Gitmo to avoid the taint of Gitmo I. The longer history, detailed in a chapter of Mead’s “God and Gold” is that Anglo-Americans tend to fight their battles with a call to the moral high-ground and their adversaries or non-enthusiasts love to find the hypocrisy. And there is always hypocrisy, if you wish to find it.
The only point I see in seeking to obtain moral high ground in pursuing armed conflict is that the government needs it to retain popular support from it’s own people. (I watched Avatar for the first time last night) If there is not popular support for sending the detainees stateside, it’s meaningless.
The detainees have had a “trial,” in the form of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The SCOTUS said that the determinations made by these tribunals would be reviewable by writ of habeas corpus. My take on this is that the trials are adequate generally, so long as they comply with Congressional mandates, but on situation-specific details, for which the SCOTUS has made no rule-making, individual determination may be found not to be satisfactory and must be redone.
Professor Anderson described this status as adopting a Continental European approach in which investigations continue for years, procedures are examined and re-examined, and the detainee remains behind bars as the belly-button lint of procedure is found endless. (paraphrasing)
“The only point I see in seeking to obtain moral high ground in pursuing armed conflict is that the government needs it to retain popular support from it’s own people.”
I am influenced by John Boyd’s theory of warfare. Are you familiar with him? Anyway, in case you are not, he considered war to have three essential elements, moral, mental and physical. Of the three, the moral is most important. That is not to say that overwhelming physical advantages cannot prevail, or that severe stupidity cannot counter a moral advantage. He defines it thusly, from Wikipedia (my copy of one of his biographies is on loan).
“Moral Warfare: the destruction of the enemy’s will to win, via alienation from allies (or potential allies) and internal fragmentation. Ideally resulting in the “dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole [organization] to exist.” (i.e., breaking down the mutual trust and common outlook mentioned in the paragraph above.)”
Boyd is better known for the OODA loop concept, but he generated general theories on warfare from his studies of war. Eccentric guy. In my mind he does not replace Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but he adds to them. From my readings of military history, this makes sense. Look back at the wars won by armies that should not have won, and it seems to fit. American Revolution kind of thing.
So, for me, removing that symbol is removing part of the glue that keeps jihadists from fragmenting.
Steve
“
Really? Greenwald says no,
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/28/guantanamo
Lets think about this….
Does government really screw things up? Yes. Even serious things like imprisoning innocent people for decades? Sure, routinely.
Was there incentives for various third parties to round up people and try to pass them off as terrorists in the early days of our efforst in Afghanistan? Absolutely.
Has the U.S. government fought tooth and nail not to go through even habeas corpus proceedings? Yes.
So, are these really the worst of the worst, unrepentant radical islamic extremists who want to kill us? Maybe after being in Gitmo for 8 years of your life yeah sure, I’d probably wont to kill a few of the people I felt were responsible too.
What is the difference between George W. Bush and Barak Obama? One is white the other is black. That’s it. It is why the arguments about politics and the presidential elections are so vitriolic…almost nothing depends on them other than perceptions and good television.
No, but you can clean up the mess. It is what a responsible adult would do. Unfortunately our Presidents don’t even rise to that standard apparently.
Now, move along citizens, nothing to see here.