After a campaign spent lambasting the Bush Administration for operations at Guantanamo Bay the new President has declared that the facility will be closed within the year. Unfortunately, more problems are created by this than by actually keeping it open.
For one, what is the administration going to do with the combatants being detained there? You know, the people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists who have committed their lives to incinerating the United States? They obviously can't release them without multiplying the folly of Gov. Dukakis' infamous furlough program by powers of a hundred. They could send them back to their countries of origin but that would seem a little hypocritical given the fact that President Obama waxed indignantly at his predecessor for such rendition (a policy the Clinton Administration practiced as well, incidentally).
Neither of these are an option obviously, so the detainees will have to be moved to a new facility, which entails even more problems. Trying to relocate them to domestic military installations, as has been suggested, will be met with fierce resistance from the communities they're located in, and understandably so. As the Wall Street Journal points out today, to have these men on American soil without the security the isolation of Guantanamo provides invites terrorist attack.
There's also that nagging little reality that all of this is farcically symbolic, as the Obama Administration will simply have to create another Guantanamo under another name to fulfill the very same purpose Guantanamo has fulfilled to date. The aforementioned problems seem a steep price to pay for such empty gestures, so wouldn't it be more pragmatic to simply reform the operations within Guantanamo that the President has objected too instead of enduring all of this heartburn? Sure he might look a little duplicitous after having promised to close the installment during the campaign, but there's been a number of positions and sentiments he held as a naïve candidate that he's since had to change when confronted with reality as President-Elect and President. This is just another one of those instances.
But as has become a pattern with this issue, there are even problems with that. He wishes to replace the system President Bush and the Congress set up in 2006 with a hypothetical process that will accord with the "basic principles of [the] Anglo-American legal system." Of course that is predicated upon the fallacy that the war we're in is a province for law-enforcement, which it most certainly is not. The detainees of Guantanamo aren't criminals but illegal combatants engaged in a type of war against the United States that we have not seen before and which, prior to 9/11, our institutions weren't constituted to respond to. Quoting the Journal again, "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."
Unfortunately for the standing of President Obama's and the Left's previous sanctimony on the matter any responsible system that recognizes this fact while providing a fair legal process to deal with these terrorists is going to have to look like a lot like that which had been set up previously by Constitution shredder-in-chief George Bush. The President should just cut his losses, admit as much, and avoid making one of his first mistakes in office.
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