May 2009
The Education of Barack Obama: Guantanamo

It seemed so easy.

On Jan. 22, two days after he was sworn in, President Obama issued an Executive Order stating, “The detention facilities at Guantánamo…shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order.”

But yesterday, by a vote of 90-6, the Senate joined the House in refusing the president’s request for funds to shut Guantanamo down until Obama explains exactly how he is going to do it. As Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post: “Lawmakers of both parties spoke out against imprisoning or releasing any of the detainees in the United States.” The vote came less than a week after the president changed his mind and, as the New York Times put it, “decided to keep the military commission system that his predecessor created to try suspected terrorists.”

The president refused to back down on Guantanamo closure today, saying in a speech at the National Archives that the detention facility is “quite simply a mess, a misguided experiment” he inherited from President Bush.

But the truth is that Obama has a huge problem on his hands.

He made a hasty decision to close the Guantanamo facility without considerng what a difficult task he had set for himself, and, in his disdain for all things Bushian, he underestimated certain strong and deep and appropriate American feelings.

Take the task first. Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to want to close Guantanamo. George W. Bush said of Gitmo on June 21, 2006: “It is my deep desire to end this program.” And, lord knows, he tried. A total of about 800 detainees entered the Guantanamo camp at one time or another over the past seven years. Of those, more than 500 were released and five died (four by suicide, one by natural causes). Roughly 240 remain. President Bush said many times that he wanted to release most of these — that is, the vast majority that would not stand trial. But release them where?

That was the problem that occupied many of the smartest minds of the Bush Administration. I know because, as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, I heard the discussions — over and over. There were three separate difficulties: 1) the home countries of many of the detainees simply refused to take them back, no matter how much effort we applied to convincing them otherwise; 2) some countries might take their citizens back but then (as in the case with China’s Uighurs) might kill or otherwise harm them; and 3) some countries were willing to take the detainees back but were unlikely to keep an eye on them after they returned. This last issue is not trivial. The New York Times reported today that an unreleased Pentagon report found that “one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity.”

To close Guantanamo, then, means to send many detainees to the United States. On American soil, it will be extremely difficult to avoid denying the niceties of American criminal justice to the detainees. And, no doubt, courts will order some of these detainees freed. Again, the question will be where. And one can easily imagine a judge saying, “The U.S. Government detained this person. If his country does not want him back, then the U.S. has an obligation to keep him.”

The matter of how to handle enemy combattants in this war (and, make no mistake, it is a war — they want to kill us, and we want to stop them) is a wickedly complicated one. The idea of Guantanamo was not a bad one. It was American soil, but it appeared at the beginning, at any rate, that detainees would not be entitled to the protections of U.S. criminal law — as they indeed should not, in my view. Court rulings have eroded that rationale.

Even if we did close Guantanamo, we would have to face the same questions in the future: Are Al Qaeda fighters criminals or soldiers? Should we allow them the protections of the Geneva Conventions even if these fighters clearly do not qualify?

Gitmo requires deep thought, not glib pronouncements. It also requires a dose of reality.

I have been to Guantanamo. It was a day trip, and I do not pretend be a penology expert, but what I saw was a clean, well-run facility, where detainees (except the worst of the worse) can commune, take exercise, pray five times a day, eat well, read, learn English, and watch videos (their favorite is “The Deadliest Catch,” about Alaskan crabbers). The food is good (I ate the detainee lunch of meatloaf and salad), and the health care abundant (the doctors told me that, physically and mentally, the average detainee is healthier than the average American). A Beligan anti-terrorist official who visited said, “At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

In fact, whatever Gitmo may have been in the past, the facility’s actual dangers today are the ones to which the guards are exposed: disgusting and deadly “cocktails” that some of the detainees mix from their own feces and urine and throw at the military.

But what about the image that concerns the president and others so much?

Has Guantanamo become a symbol of American brutality and high-handedness? Certainly. Do terrorists kill people because of their rage over Guantanamo? I am skeptical of such alleged motivation. After all, the first World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the bombings of the two embassies in Africa, and 9/11 itself were all perpetrated without the existence of a U.S. detention center for terrorists at Guantanamo or anywhere else.

But are there methods, using the tools of public diplomacy, to address the misperception of Gitmo without releasing the majority of the remaining detainees into America’s cities and towns? I believe so, and in my final months at the State Department, I was addressing that issue, as were foreign service officers in places like Kuwait. It was no piece of cake — in part, because there was resistance at State and Defense to dealing, in a public-diplomacy sense, with Gitmo at all. Better to bury your head in the sand.

The answer, both politically and practically, is not to shut the place down abruptly. Whatever the president said today, I think he is learning that foreign policy and national security — especially as they relate to America’s image abroad — are matters a lot more thorny than they appear from the outside and that to do the opposite of what George Bush did is not a strategy but, in some cases, a trap.

http://www.jameskglassman.com/?p=154

If a person can't be convicted they shouldn't be locked up. And torture is evil

So is bombing a building using the family members of your enemies!

As I have said before evil begats evil.

One is sometimes forced to use a bit to combat a lot.

Doesn't make it right... But it might be expedient and possibly even prudent.

After all Gitmoe contains hundreds.(and many of those have been released).

HOW MANY DIED IN THE TOWERS.

Our constitution has provisions in it about not being locked up with out due process.

On the op.

Mr. Obama is getting the education of a lifetime.

Some of the lessons he's learned quickly.

The rest of them he still be a bit slow on.

Hope it don't take 4 years to sink in.

Agreed. Another good read on how Obama changed the words but not the policies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/politics/02web-baker.html

"Indeed, for all the shifting words, Mr. Obama has left the bulk of Mr. Bush’s national security architecture intact so far. He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered Guantánamo to be closed in a year but has not turned loose all the prisoners. The troop buildup in Afghanistan resembles the one Mr. Bush ordered in Iraq two years ago."

2 things, If you do evil to stop evil, you've just become the thing you sought to stop.

The other is, don't get me started about the false flag event on 9/11.

Well said. Of course the libs don't want to lock anyone up. They believe everyone can be fixed.

Hollywood liberals will start making movies glamorizing detainees and they’ll be at next years Oscar’s in tuxedo’s.



<<WAR IS HELL>> - Injustices occur anytime men fight for what they think is a greater justice. Man is not perfect in war. Solutions in the aftermath of war are not in black and white. President Obama knows this now. Obama may have changed some of the words but the policies are still the same as Bush.

Two wrongs don't make a right,

but then, what do I know?

Might be better than the alternative which is to lock everyone up that we don't particularly like. I don't think everyone can be fixed, but I am fairly sure, we the public, don't know how many of these men are innocent and from the looks of it many don't care.
Gitmo mirrored out own vicious nature. I think Gitmo should be shut down in an orderly and conscious fashion. I think the folks in washington should show some real back bone for a change, on both sides of the isle.

I don't know how we can be respected at all if our consitution expects due process but we use it selectively. It seems that we are the flip floppers on what America stands for.

what does this have to do w/Obama's education?

I don't think they meant his background. I think they mean getting an education while in office about the realities he could not have been privy to before hand. I personally think every president gets and education once in, whether they use it or not is another thing.

Oh btw, I am assuming that was what this article meant..

yay, so I was right. In reading the posts, topic jumped over to the usual name calling (liberal, etc) so figured I'd just come out and ask.

Thanks Boo

oooh ya, those scary liberals. I don't get why people don't see that there are scary people period, and they come from both sides. What bothers me is that we are making an education out to be a bad thing, when an education is the ony thing that will save us from ourselves.

Considerinhg some of the detainees had nothing to do with 9/11, your point is mute.

Detaining people without cause, without process is wrong. We are not even "technically" at war at this time so they cannot even be considered prisoners of war.

They need due process and if there is not enough to hold them they need to be released.


Despite how Bush made our country look we are not ignorant animals here and we should not act so.

We are not technically at war. War was never declared against anyone by Bush except the illusive bull **** War on terror. Which was just his excuse to do what he wanted to us and them.

As for the OP, Obama will learn while in office and there is nothing wrong with that. He will also figure out what to do about Gitmo detainees. Not everyone will be happy but to end the torture and us being like animals it will be worth it.

What Obama is learning is that in many instance he will have to be more like Bush.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/20/obama-backs-bush-on-bagra_n_168766.htm

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

"The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better."

The Supreme Court last summer gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether they, too, can sue to be released.

Three months after the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact an attorney. Their petition was filed by relatives on their behalf since they had no way of getting access to the legal system.

The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition last year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.

After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.

"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

The Justice Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay because it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held as part of a military action. The government argues that releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.

The government also said if the Bagram detainees got access to the courts, it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in conflicts worldwide to do the same.

It's not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.

The same day, however, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter cited that privilege in asking an appeals court to uphold dismissal of a suit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations that tortured them.

Letter said that Obama officials approved his argument.