This WSJ editorial burns me up. "Isn't responsibility fun?" WSJ asks snidely. No, Obama never said he was in this for s--ts and giggles. And no, taking responsibility for your predecessor's messes, after he failed to do it himself, is no fun at all. Not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Guantanamo Bay.
The creation of "G'itmo" is a mirror image of Bush's disastrous Iraq policy: act quickly and decisively, giving yourself no back door or parachute, and then worry about the consequences later. Apparently, Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney, and Bush didn't stop to think for one minute what they were going to do with these hundreds of inmates. What, eventually have them all shot? Keep them locked up for life without charges or trials, and not suffer a single outside inquiry from concerned family, friends, or home governments?
The shrug-of-the-shoulders irresponsibility of Bush's thoughtless decision to build a place like G'itmo in the first place is astounding and infuriating. You'd expect school children to come up with such a naïve, undeveloped idea: "Hey, let's build a jail on the moon, or deep under the ocean, and send all the terror suspects there!" Hey, let's send every Muslim with a beard we find in Afghanistan to some God-forsaken corner of Cuba, where U.S. laws and human rights don't apply! Um, not so fast.
The WSJ will prove itself to be infinitely snarky and immature if its attitude toward Obama every time he tries to clean up on one of Dubya's doo-doo piles is to snap, "See, it's not so easy now, is it, Mr. Messiah?"
Thanks to Bush's handling of G'itmo, Iraq, the economy, etc., I'd say a good metaphor for Obama's first term is going to be Andy Dufresne's escape in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: crawling on his belly through 500 yards of the worst slime and filth you can imagine, before finally emerging to sweet freedom.
Fighting terrorism is simpler when you're a candidate.
January 22, 2009 | WSJ.com
Campaign promises are so much easier to adhere to when they're strictly hypothetical, as Barack Obama is discovering. The then-President-elect said 10 days ago on ABC that while he still plans to close Guantanamo, "it is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize" and that "many" of the enemy combatants are "very dangerous."
Merely for gesturing at this reality, Mr. Obama suffered the blunt-force trauma of his left-wing allies, and the panicked transition leaked new details on the Administration's intentions last week. On Tuesday the Pentagon halted military commissions at Guantanamo for 120 days, and reports as we went to press yesterday said Mr. Obama would sign an executive order today that the base be closed within a year. This was after he told the Washington Post that closure might take even longer. Isn't responsibility fun?
The first practical question is where to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 245 or so other remaining G'itmo prisoners. Dangerous enemy combatants can't simply be released into the streets. The Obama camp says that after reviewing the classified files, it will try to repatriate as many as safely possible. But 60 already cleared for release remain because they may be persecuted by their home countries. And even Mr. Obama's vaunted diplomacy is unlikely to convince rights-protecting countries to resettle people he believes are too dangerous to release in the U.S. -- and the more willing Mr. Obama is to release prisoners, the more difficult this problem will become.
One suggestion is moving the remaining prisoners to Kansas's Fort Leavenworth, but state politicians are already sounding a red alert. The military base is integrated into the community and, lacking Guantanamo's isolation and defense capacities, would instantly become a potential terror target. Expect similar protests from other states that are involuntarily entered in this sweepstakes.
[This is a terrible idea. Thank goodness Obama didn't give it a thought. – J]
In any event, this option merely relocates Guantanamo to American soil under another name. The core challenge is not a matter of geography but ensuring a stable legal framework for detaining and punishing fighters engaged in unconventional warfare against the U.S.
In the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Bush Administration and Congress painstakingly set thresholds for who can be detained and under what rules. Mr. Obama argues that work was flawed and that the trials should not continue in their present form. But he also said in his ABC sitdown that he wants to create "a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system, but doing it in a way that doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up."
Sounds great. But this "balance" is difficult to strike because many of the Guantanamo prisoners haven't committed crimes per se but are dedicated American enemies and too dangerous to let go. Other cases involve evidence that is insufficient for trial but still sufficient to determine that release is an unacceptable security risk.
[They are guilty because they are guilty. Their guilt is assumed. The problem is how to display their guilt in a court and guarantee a guilty verdict. This is the point of view of all G'itmo defenders. Mao or Stalin would have recognized such legal reasoning. – J]
The stock anti-antiterror position is that detainees should be charged with crimes, either through military courts-martial or (preferably) the ordinary criminal justice system. Anyone who can't be indicted should be set free. But such trials are unworkable even for the 70 or 80 detainees that prosecutors had planned to try with military commissions, let alone prisoners who are too dangerous to release but for which there isn't sufficient evidence for a tribunal, much less civilian courts. Critics like to point to aggressive interrogations as somehow tainting these cases, but the real problems are far more prosaic. For instance, any evidence probably can't be admitted in civilian courts because terrorists aren't read their Miranda rights when picked up in combat zones.
[I like the way the WSJ acknowledges the anti-torture argument without actually addressing it. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that a confession elicited under torture can't be considered admissible in a court of law. Otherwise, you must be prepared to explain why hundreds of thousands of innocents who were tortured and sent to Soviet gulags or executed were not guilty. – J]
An alternative to military commissions that is gaining political traction is the idea of a national security court, composed of Article III judges to supervise detentions and administer trials. There are real risks here. Politically, it will cost time and capital that Mr. Obama probably prefers to spend elsewhere. Practically, any new system is likely to face the same legal challenges from the white-shoe lawyers at Shearman and Sterling and anti-antiterror activists that for years tied down military commissions.
But legal experts across the political spectrum including Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, the Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes and Georgetown's Neal Katyal advance this option as a way to restore "credibility" to the detainee process. The national security court would operate under rules of evidence and classification that would allow the military to avoid compromising intelligence sources and methods, as well as admit intelligence gathered under battlefield conditions.
[Harvard, Brookings, Georgetown: Part of the neocon axis in U.S. think tanks and academe. WSJ is right, a national security court is also a stupid idea. – J]
Then again, such rules would be almost identical to those now used in . . . George Bush's military commissions. On wiretaps, interrogations and now G'itmo, the new Administration is discovering that the left-wing attack lines against Bush policies are mostly simplistic illusions. Now those critics are Mr. Obama's problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment