There are no friends in politics, just interests. Some in the White House relearned that dictum this week, as their party dissolved into factions, and largely knelt down in front ofRepublican political priorities.
As usual, administration officials won't concede that the overwhelming Senate vote against funding to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay was a defeat for the president's agenda. In Obama World, every short-term defeat is a long-term opportunity. No doubt, as press secretary Robert Gibbs repeated today, that Obama inherited a gooey situation from his predecessor, and that court rulings handed down daily force the administration to modify its position in tiny but precedent-setting increments.
But the President, and his senior advisers, bear at least some responsibility for the grand gesture of promising to shut down Guantanamo Bay within a year well before the administration had begun to review the casebooks and intelligence reports about the 240 odd detainees in United States custody. The shrewdness of Obama's executive order on day two cannot be denied, nor can its targeted audience - European and Arab governments, and the broader world - be ignored in the current debate. Gitmo was a "rallying cry" for Al Qaeda - that line's for public consumption - and for anti-Americanism abroad, for European smugness, for exasperation with America by Moslems everywhere.
The political imperative preceded the functional imperative, which, in the case of disposing of the detainees, means statutory changes to American law, which means that Congress must have a central say in what happens.
Already, the facts on the ground have forced Obama to change his assumptions about how the detainees will be tried. It had been the hope of administration legal advisers that a majority of the 240 - perhaps a large majority - would be tried in federal courts. Then they discovered that the evidentiary thresholds for doing so were too high given the quality of information the Bush government had collected about the detainees, and they subsequently concluded that Article III trials wouldn't be as swift as an option that they wanted to reserve for only a couple dozen high-value detainees: the military commissions. But by the time it became clear to the administration that most of the detainees would have to have their day in military court, Republicans had already dug a moat around the Democrats, pressing them to severely limit the President's hand. That's one reason why Harry Reid was eager to get today's vote out of the way; it prevents even more damaging amendments from reaching the floor, amendments which might have forced the administration to give up entirely on its goal of closing Guantanamo Bay.
The plain truth is that the administration fully expects to hold a number of detainees in indefinite custody within the United States. (Ironically, had Guantanamo not become a lightning rod for the world, it might have been the perfect place to build long-term detention facilities.) European governments won't take dangerous detainees; a plan to transfer many of them to rehabilitation camps in Yemen foundered once U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Yemeni rehabbed-prisoners had a recidivism rate as high as Lindsay Lohan's. Saudi Arabia might take some prisoners, but it won't be able to torture them, and the U.S. remains privately skeptical that they can work out a transparent enough deal. There are no good options, as many Republicans acknowledge, including Sen. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the politics of Guantanamo will get tougher for Democrats and Obama before they get any easier.
Who is to say that his pronouncement came before he had a chance to review the status of the detainees? He received intelligence briefings between election and inauguration and was in close cooperation with the outgoing administration throughout the transition. Members of the transition team had security clearances in November.
Unless Obama is willing, like Bush, to make an argument that detainees at Guantanamo have a different legal status than those detained within a state based on their location, there is no reason to think that this was a risk. Obama hasn't even gone out of his way to make the obvious and logical argument that Durbin made on the Senate floor this week (we hold terrorists all the time, no one's escaped a supermax ever, don't let people scare you with lies) because the Republican threat here is toothless and won't survive public scrutiny if the issue ever really enters the national spotlight.
Evidentiary standards were always going to be a problem for anyone captured in a military operation. Hearsay evidence is almost required, which is hugely problematic.
This too would always be the case.
This is the opposite of ironic. Guantanamo became a lightning rod for the world precisely because it was the perfect place to build long-term detention facilities, hence such facilities were built, hence it became a lightning rod.
"There are no good options" was Bush's point before, and the entire reason Guantanamo exists in the first place. Even for those like Sen. McCain who wanted reforms to Guantanamo, their entire point was that there were no good options.
What you're saying is that President Obama condemned the options and insisted that it was not a hard decision, only to come into office and claim essentially that Bush (and especially McCain, who called for additional safeguards to Bush's basic position) was right all long, and that it was a hard decision.
I'm curious as to when was the last time the US was forced to hold detainees "in indefinite custody" after a war.
Minor detail: Guantanamo wouldn't be such a lightning rod if we didn't say...torture people there.
Oh, you mean Johnson v. Eisentrager? The answer is 1950, or after World War II. You know, the one that decided that "nonresident enemy aliens, captured and imprisoned abroad, have no right to a writ of habeas corpus in a court of the United States."
The bigger problem with this one is that it's not clear when the war will ever end, since it's not a declared war against an enemy that wears uniforms, has prisoner exchanges, a chance to surrender, etc.
I suppose. Yet ADX Florence and Fort Leavenworth aren't lightning rods, and we certainly torture people there. Supermax treatment is rough stuff, and leads to psychosis. Nor do people particularly care about British torture of IRA suspects, or French torture and indefinite imprisonment of terrorist suspects, or Spanish torture and indefinite imprisonment of ETA and other terrorist suspects.
Slag, your last point is the correct one. Obama needs to convince the world that what once allegedly went on at Gitmo no longer happens. That will give him the option of keeping it open, which would be the right call.
Vail Beach: One problem.
The One is building Gitmo squared at Bagram. He has no credibility on this issue.
Marc, you can't ignore that the Democrats made Gitmo an international issue, with their unceasing, demagogic rhetoric designed to damage the reputation of the incumbent Republican administration in a time of war, aided and abetted by major media outlets with known leftist editorial views. Democrats have for years seemed unconcerned about the implications of closing Gitmo that have now come home to roost. The international reputation of the U.S. has been tarnished for political gain, and people are beginning to realize it.
When you spell "Muslim" as "Moslem" you sound like you're from the 1860s. For me, at least, that spelling carries...unpleasant associations. Take it or leave it as you like.