There is a sickening déjà vu to President Obama’s plans for the prisoners that were bequeathed to him by his short sighted predecessor. On Friday the Washington Post ran a story, quoting three anonymous “senior government officials”, that related the headaches the Obama team has had trying to close the prison at Guantanamo. Specifically, there was this:
Three months into the Justice Department’s reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released.
The strange legal world in which those 90 men find themselves is yet another of the political traps that Barack Obama and company knowingly walked into in January. The government is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that these men are threats. But they do not feel that they can adequately demonstrate that to a judge or a jury. It’s the same problem Bush the Younger created for himself when he built the Guantanamo prison seven years ago. He futzed and fiddled and was able to fend off the courts until his term expired. Obama doesn’t have the same option.
Unfortunately one of the solutions he’s come up with, one he’s apparently thinking very seriously about, is the same dumb shit that caused the mess in the first place:
Under one White House draft that was being discussed this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system.
Now, as Glenn Greenwald rightly points out, this is only a trial balloon article. It isn’t the plan yet. And let’s hope it doesn’t end up being the plan because not only is it a base abandonment of longstanding American ideals but it’s also all but doomed to failure. Indefinite detention is fundamentally an Executive power play and if the far more vicious Bush Administration was unable to pull it off, what chance does Obama have?
Does he have the stomach for the gut wrenching realities to which these policies inevitably lead? After he’s given a few inches to the Terror Warriors, will he be able to stop them from taking a few miles? And, is he prepared to hang his subordinates out to dry on the Hill in the face of angry and embarrassing questions from other Democrats? Those are troubling questions because when it comes time to pay the political price for this, and that time will come, the people he’s pleasing now will not have his back.
I’ve said before that I think Obama’s capitulation to national security wackaloons is a cynical ploy designed to keep things like torture, Guantanamo and the like off the front page while he works on his domestic agenda; I stand by that reasoning. I don’t like it, but I’m not the guy with the responsibility and they undoubtedly have a better understanding of the political landscape than I do. But the Obama Administration is playing with fire here and, even worse, they’re being very cavalier about it. Bush the Younger, Dick Cheney and the rest of their criminal gang did these things too. But they, at least in part, did them because they sincerely believe the macho bullshit about “they hate us for our freedoms”. When push came to shove they were always willing to push back harder because they were ideologues. The further they slipped down the moral slope the more progress they thought they were making.
But Obama isn’t an ideologue, at least, not that we can tell; I’m just not sure if he realizes the depth of the shit bog he’s eagerly wading into. There was some hope in that Post article though:
Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Putting Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other men directly involved with the 2001 attacks in a federal courtroom in New York City would be a tremendously important step, for the rule of law and for America’s reputation abroad. But the others cannot be squirreled away indefinitely, there are too many journalists, too many bloggers, too many watchers. You can call it “prolonged detention” if you want to, but those are men with names and faces and in this day and age they cannot simply be made to disappear. The Bush Administration tried that already, and look what happened to them.
