An Obama Administration will have many messes to clean, many mistakes to correct. None of them are going to be easy to fix, but some are simpler than others. One of the simplest, and one that will quickly yield tremendous benefits, is the immediate closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Getting the hell out of Iraq and implementing an Afghanistan policy that isn’t self defeating (which may also mean getting the hell out) are equally vital, but those are projects that are simply beyond the scope of the first few days or weeks of an Administration. Closing Guantanamo, on the other hand, can be done almost immediately.
There are roughly 140,000 American troops in Iraq and roughly 34,000 in Afghanistan; by contrast there are, as of last month, “approximately 255” prisoners left in Cuba. We now know that most of the men originally sent to Guantanamo were either of no intelligence value or completely innocent. Even if all 255 of the remaining prisoners are hardcore terrorists who need to be incarcerated in maximum security facilities it’s impossible that either the military or the federal penal system lacks the capacity to hold them.
Of course, all 255 of them aren’t hardcore terrorists. We know at least one of them, Salim Hamdan, was a lowly driver and has a sentence set to expire in January. We also know that seventeen of them, ethnic Uighurs from China, are so non-threatening that a federal judge recently ordered them released in Washington. Since they’re caught in the legal netherworld where the Bush Administration only obeys court decisions it approves of they’re still down in Cuba, the judge’s order having been stayed on appeal. In Hamdan’s case the Administration simply declared that it wouldn’t release him upon the completion of his sentence, even though he was tried and sentenced in their own crooked military tribunal system.
In fact, that tribunal system is so crooked that its own prosecutors won’t go along with it. Just yesterday came word that charges against five men had been dropped. From USA Today (via Raw Story):
Some of the harshest words came last month from the very man who was to prosecute the five men against whom charges were dropped.
Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld said during a pretrial hearing for a sixth detainee this month that the war-crimes trials are unfair. Vandeveld said the military was withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense in that case, and was doing so in others. He resigned over his concerns.
The simple fact is that Guantanamo has become more than an embarrassment; it’s a detriment to every American interaction with the wider world. It is a powerful and renowned symbol of everything that’s gone wrong. Its original purpose was to be a place where American law did not reach, but the Supreme Court has steadily eaten away at that insane notion. Because many of the men have been tortured, and the cases against them are most likely flimsy to the point of transparency without evidence produced by torture, the current Administration fears putting them state side lest they be forced to release them. The Administration’s position, through all the years, can basically be boiled down to one simple, abhorrent notion: we can do whatever we want with these men. Convicted and served your sentence? You stay until we say so. Innocent and ordered released? You stay until we say so. Guilty but we’re afraid to put you on trial? You stay until we say so.
If the Bush Administration were going to continue for a further two years or longer this convoluted legal grinding could conceivably continue that entire time. (Indeed, Bush the Younger recently rejected a State Department proposal to close the place.) Instead our new president will have a brief window to order the place closed forever and bury the stain and stigma with Bush the Younger and the rest of his failed presidency.
In the case of true terrorists, especially those like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who had a hand in the 11 September attacks, there should be more than enough non-torture evidence to put their ass on trial in front of a New York City jury with great confidence that they’ll end up locked away for however many decades it takes them to die old and forgotten. Only the cleansing process of putting these men through federal court can begin to wash off the stink of this shameful affair.
Closing Guantanamo is the kind of simple administrative act that a new President could undertake immediately. Simply removing the prisoners from Cuba and expediting the process of either repatriation or settling them here in America would confirm the righteousness of the new President in the eyes of the world, begin the process of healing our government’s self inflicted wounds, and start us all on the road back to sanity. If it stays open much past January though it will become the new President’s mess. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
