Giving Up on Guantánamo

Obama’s plans to close it are a symbolic act that will encourage our enemies.

By James S. Robbins
Friday, January 23, 2009

President Obama has issued an executive order making good on his promise to close down America’s detainee facility at Guantánamo Bay, though not as rapidly as his supporters wanted. While activists will hail this as a major step towards dismantling the Bush administration’s wartime policies, the Guantánamo they object to exists more as reputation than reality. To many, the name Guantánamo screams “No Due Process!” “Torture!” and “War Crimes!” But Camp Delta is the most humane facility of its type in the history of warfare.

The detainees are given immaculately clean clothes and living spaces. Their meals are balanced, nutritious, and halal—detainees weigh more upon release than upon arrival. They receive the same medical care as our service personnel. And the inmates’ religious practices are given great deference, to the point where it works counter to the mission of the facility. To the terrorists, Islam is more ideology than faith; it’s an operational code and methodology for promoting cohesion and radical identity. From this standpoint, giving al-Qaeda members copies of the Koran could have the same results as giving Nazi POWs a copy of Mein Kampf. Our indulgent policy in this regard has actively bolstered the terrorists’ morale, group solidarity, and ability to resist the legitimate intelligence objectives of the entire enterprise. We knew that it would, but we have let them practice their religion nonetheless.

Stand that against some of the invidious comparisons of the last few years, such as “The American Gulag.” Somewhere in heaven Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is chuckling with a wry smile at the members of the useful-idiot Western intelligentsia who came up with that one. The absurdity—and obscenity—of the comparison is obvious to anyone with even the most limited knowledge of the two institutions. The fact that such charges make effective propaganda is mostly a testament to the propensity of the media to reflexively grasp at the sensational, and of partisan politicians to stoke unwarranted outrage for political gain. The same is true of comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, where inmates tended not to find the kosher option.

But if the objections to Guantánamo have to do with the practices there, what is the point in closing it? It would be easier simply to change the objectionable policies and keep using Camp Delta. The president could institute whatever safeguards he thinks are required for due process and move ahead from there. After all, a facility is needed somewhere. Closing Guantánamo just so Obama can say he closed it amounts to mere chest beating. (See also Andrew McCarthy’s NRO article on the politics behind the closure.)

As a highly secure facility far removed from the U.S., Guantánamo is well suited for its purpose. The reason the detainee facility was put there dates back to a Clinton-era decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In that case, Cuban American Bar Association v. Christopher (1995), Janet Reno’s Justice Department successfully argued that Cuban and Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo had no constitutional rights or rights under international treaties because, while the area was under U.S. “jurisdiction and control,” it was not sovereign territory. This legal limbo made the location ideal for Global War on Terror detainees because they would not be able to assert habeas corpus or other due-process rights, and thus would not be able to use the U.S. court system as a new arena to pursue their struggle. This rationale was struck down in substance by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush (2008).

Suppose the facility is closed. How to “dispose of” (to use the language of Obama’s executive order) the approximately 250 inmates? They can’t just be cut loose. Most of the detainees who could safely have been released already have been, along with at least five dozen genuine terrorists who went right back to terrorism. Those who remain at Guantánamo are there for a reason. Some have been cleared for release but are being kept in custody instead of returning them to home countries where the debate over what constitutes torture is a little less rarefied. Prisoners in these countries are subject to beatings, dismemberment, electrocution, pulling out of teeth and fingernails, forced starvation, unsanitary conditions, and roving feral animals—things notably missing from the Bush administration’s “torture memos.”

Suppose we decide to move the inmates. To where? Foreign countries might take them, though whether the standard treatment for prisoners in those locales matches that at Camp Delta is open to question, particularly in the developing world. Then there is Pennsylvania. Rep. Jack Murtha’s offhand statement that "they’re no more dangerous in my district than in Guantánamo" is wrong in several ways. First, escaped terrorists (or their would-be rescuers) would harm a lot more Americans in Pennsylvania than they would in Cuba. Second, the detention facility at Guantánamo lies within a tightly guarded 45-square-mile naval base that would be virtually impossible to duplicate in Murtha’s district. And third, Guantánamo’s coastal location makes it easier to defend than it would be in the middle of the Alleghenies.

Perhaps Murtha’s constituents are less sanguine about the bull’s-eye he wants to paint on them. But wherever the detainees are moved (at great cost), they will constitute a heightened security risk, and legal avenues will be opened up for them to tie up the court system for years. Their trials will be extensive, complex, and far beyond what even the Supreme Court has defined as due process, and could well pose the government a difficult choice between revealing classified evidence and freeing terrorists.

So in President Obama’s executive order we have a wholly symbolic act that implicitly, if not explicitly, seems to confirm the worst of the undeserved criticisms leveled at the United States. It is domestic political grandstanding, and a present to the terrorists and their sympathizers, who can claim victory over the United States and its “torture camp.” It will impose unnecessary financial and legal burdens on the United States and create a permanent security problem wherever the detainees end up. It makes one wonder if the new White House team has the seriousness of purpose to prosecute the war on terrorism successfully.