President Obama made a change in direction, ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay yesterday after signaling that it may stay open longer. What wasn’t said is more prescient than what was.
President Obama asked his White House Counsel Greg Craig whether moving the prisoners was part of his own executive order though you’d assume he’d know what’s in it. Anyway, we’ll learn the fates of the Gitmo residents in a later executive order sometime this year. The White House is going to wing it.
There’s a slight problem with the Gitmo detainees: no one wants them. Of the estimated 245 prisoners at least 60 have been rejected for repatriation to their home countries. These “worst of the worst” could be sent to prisons in the mainland U.S., however there will be resistance for that too. There is much squawking about taking them at Leavinworth because it would instantly change it from part of a sleepy Kansas community to a terrorist target. Prepare for protests no matter where they’re located. Maybe President Obama will have the good taste to put them in a blue area of a blue state, such as downtown Manhattan or Hollywood.
The results are easy to predict. The New York Times is reporting that the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Said Ali al-Shihri, is a graduate of Gitmo and a Saudi reeducation camp for terrorists. The camp apparently is like a 12-step program with a high rate of relapse. Mr. al-Shihri should be captured and sent back to make his own bed and have a group discussion about how his mother’s neglect caused him to kill nonbelievers.
Some of the Guantanamo Bay detainees will certainly be set loose and many will plan to attack us. If there is another terrorist attack carried out by those released from Gitmo we’ll have ourselves to blame for not analyzing campaign promises.
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What you are describing is yet another Bush administration-created mess that must be cleaned up by the current president.
ReplyDelete(Now, I am going to reveal a little bit about the line of work Rave may be involved in...)
Looking at this situation through the lens of behavioral science, it appears to me as if the Bush administration's approaches to the "war on terror" were all consequence-based. Nary a thought appeared to have been given to what we refer to as "setting events" and "antecedents," environmental conditions and precursors to problem behavior. A good behaviorist knows that one of the most important ways to address problem behavior is to create conditions that make it less likely for the problem behavior to occur in the first place.
The Bush administration focused its efforts on tracking down alleged "enemy combatants" and sending them off to hell on an island where they could rot for the rest of eternity, whether or not they were, indeed, guilty of "enemy combatant"-type actions. It would be impossible to capture every person who might be an "enemy combatant." For every (real) "enemy combatant" that has been captured, there are most likely a thousand more standing in the wings. How many faraway prisons can we build?
Meanwhile, the world scoffed at our hypocrisy and the extremists added fuel to their ever-growing fires...and the Bush administration pursued its consequence-based strategies, refusing to engage in activities that would deal with digging up the real roots of hatred and conflict. We used torture in order to supposedly protect our country-the country that is supposed to stand up for principles of democracy and basic human rights.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” (Obama, Inaugural Speech, January 20, 2009)
ReplyDeleteI disagree that Guantanamo Bay is a "mess." In nearly all military conflicts there are prisoners of war who have to be kept somewhere.
ReplyDeleteIn WWII both sides made camps surrounded by barbed wire where prisoners were kept and fed (sometimes) until the end of the war. Those within had correctly had no access to courts or lawyers.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a little fuzzy in that prisoners from our side get beheaded and there isn't a secure local place to keep theirs. Gitmo was created to hold the worst enemy combatants until hostilities end in a place where escape is impossible. Until hostilities end.
There will never be enough prisons to hold enemies, and hostilities will never end, until we begin to engage in the "robust diplomacy" described by Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, an overemphasis on consequences and an obliviousness to the real roots of the problem.
We're pretty resourceful. We could build a lot of prisons if we put our minds to it.
ReplyDeleteOr we could just eliminate the problem of prisoners and kill the enemy with missiles fired from drones. That's what President Obama ordered for the suspects in Pakistan. That diplomacy was very, very robust.
The President is rumored to have said, "Kill them all and let God sort them out." Or maybe that was me.
Your hawkish wingspan is sure showing with this one!
ReplyDeleteI'll be posting later this evening.