Close Down Guantanamo?

The United Nations Committee on Torture has called upon the United States to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. This only echoes similar calls which have come from other international organizations and leftist entities within this country. Amnesty International labeled Guantanamo as "the Gulag of our times" in its 2005 report and Sen. Richard Durbin infamously compared Americans there to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings" on the floor of the United States Senate.

This most recent call for closure, along with every other one previously made, merits a multiple-pronged response.

First and foremost, there is sparse, if any evidence that detainees are being mistreated in the Guantanamo detention facility. Sure there have been isolated incidents of mistreatment, as is inevitably the case in any detention facility of a nature roughly similar to Guantanamo. But no evidence has come to light exposing any structural or systemic existence of detainee mistreatment or torture. In fact, when detainee treatment at Guantanamo was in a much more prominent position in the public consciousness and discourse multiple congressional delegations visited Guantanamo and every member, even those who had been critical of detainee treatment there, reported that detainees were being treated considerably well.

Secondly, were the United States to close down Guantanamo what would the U.N. Committee on Torture propose we do with those detained there? Surely they don’t suggest we simply drop them off in their home countries, free to once again take up arms against the United States and our allies, the exact reason for which they were captured and detained in the first place? If we were to close down Guantanamo we would have to hold the Guantanamo detainees in an establishment identical in nature and effect to Guantanamo. Closing down the current Guantanamo would only necessitate the need to construct another Guantanamo by a different name.

Finally, instead of badgering the United States about Guantanamo shouldn’t the U.N. Committee on Torture, as well as the international community and the American left as a whole, spend its time addressing actual havens of torture such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran, etc.? If the committee is to justify its name, I am of the opinion that it ought to focus its time and energies on countries where torture is an actual policy, not on free and democratic countries such as the United States who abhor the practice and blush deep shades of red when it is carried out by Americans against national policy and standards of human rights and decency.

This report is just another frivolous waste of time from an increasingly frivolous United Nations.

Hat Tip: John Hinderaker