Guantanamo 1, Obama 0
How the president took on reality and lost.
JANUARY 8, 2010.
By JAMES TARANTO
Two weeks from today is the deadline for emptying the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, a cutoff that the newly inaugurated President Obama established as one of his first acts in office. No one anymore expects his administration to meet the deadline, and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports that there is increasing doubt as to whether it will carry out the promise at all. "I'm beginning to think that Guantánamo is not ever going to be closed," a Bush administration lawyer and Guantanamo foe, tells Isikoff: "I would bet some money that it's not going to get closed in the Obama presidency":
"To some extent, I think the administration has blown it," adds Marc Falkoff, a lawyer who represents some of the Yemeni detainees at Gitmo. "It has delayed, and they've gotten themselves into a reactive state and you can't get anything done when you're reacting to political winds. . . . It looks like Guantánamo will be around for the foreseeable future."
Obama's promise has run up against reality in several different ways. The revelation that former detainees now based in Yemen were involved in planning the Christmas attack in Detroit prompted the administration to announce a halt to repatriation of Yemenis. (In fairness, we hasten to note that the ex-detainees who rejoined the fight were released while George W. Bush was president.) It turns out there really are terrorists at Guantanamo--who knew?
Well, Democrats in Congress knew (though who knew they knew?). Isikoff reports that the administration cannot legally carry out its plan to move detainees to Illinois's Thomson Correctional Center:
The administration is already blocked from moving any Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. for purposes other than putting them on trial. That's the result of a rider to a congressional appropriations bill that passed overwhelmingly last spring and which expires Sept. 30.
In order to move the Yemenis and other Gitmo detainees to Thomson, the administration needs to persuade the Congress to lift the rider--in an election year, no less--a much more difficult task when the proposal is to move more than 100 detainees to the U.S. rather than 20 or 30.
Opposition to Obama's terrorist-importation plan is bipartisan, notes Isikoff: "If Republicans make big gains in the fall elections, as many analysts now predict, the odds of lifting the anti-Gitmo rider would become even steeper."
But here's the kicker. It turns out the detainees themselves prefer to stay put:
Many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.
Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a "supermax" security prison under near-lockdown conditions.
To the limited extent that the Geneva Conventions have been held to protect unlawful enemy combatants, the detainees would enjoy that protection at Thomson too. They would also have additional rights under U.S. law, since they would be under the jurisdiction of the local U.S. district court rather than the special federal jurisdiction created by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. As a practical matter, though, their lives are cushier at Guantanamo than they would be at Thomson, in part because the risk of escape from a military facility in the middle of nowhere is considerably less than from a prison in the American heartland.
Is there any argument left for closing Guantanamo? Claims of detainee abuse were mostly bunk to begin with (remember when Isikoff's magazine claimed falsely that an interrogator had flushed a Koran down a toilet?), and any irregularities have long since been remedied. The president is reduced to making the frivolous claim that the existence of Guantanamo is dangerous because it is somehow useful to al Qaeda's recruiting efforts.
Ultimately, the case against Guantanamo can be reduced to an ad hominem attack. Obama and his supporters loathe it because it is a symbol of the hated George W. Bush. For the president of the United States, it is past time to move on from petty grievances and deal in a serious and forthright way with the demands of American national security.
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