No Compromise on Enemy Combatants

We’re winning because we should be winning.

Andrew McCarthy
Friday, February 12, 2010

Imagine the Yanks are beating the Mets 12–0 in the eighth inning (I know — not hard to imagine). Now, imagine if the Mets approach the Yanks and say, “How ’bout we give you a new Gatorade barrel, and we call this thing a draw?” Joe Girardi would laugh them out of the dugout and say, “Hey, you want to forfeit, go ahead and forfeit. Otherwise, get back out on the field and finish getting your brains beat in.”

This is how we ought to think about rumors swirling around that the Obama administration is looking for a deal on enemy combatants and that some GOP types are listening. The compromise would be: KSM gets a military commission, but Republicans agree to close Gitmo and bring the combatants to stateside federal prisons.

This would be a terrible sell-out of our national security. It would also be unnecessary. The American people strongly support military commissions for enemy combatants — not for all terrorism cases, but for all unlawful alien enemy operatives who have no right to be tried in our civilian courts and for whom Congress has authorized military commissions.

The American people also support holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, a secure, off-shore military facility. U.S. taxpayers have already plunked down over $200 million to turn Gitmo into a state-of-the-art, Geneva Convention–compliant facility that even Obama administration officials concede is first-rate. There is no reason on earth to create a security problem inside our country when we have gone to Herculean lengths to create a perfect location outside our country.

The Left’s counter to this is the claim that Gitmo fuels terrorist recruitment. That is absurd, and, as I’ve said before, confuses a pretext with a cause. People in the Islamic world could not care less whether we are detaining Muslim terrorists based on civilian protocols or under the laws of war: They don’t know the difference. The Blind Sheikh’s disciples mass-murdered people in an attempt to extort his release despite the fact that he is in a nice civilian jail after having had his nice civilian trial. What offends many in the umma is that we are holding Muslim terrorists, period. They don’t care where.

The only people actually offended by Gitmo are leftists who regard it as a symbol of Bush-style counterterrorism. Those people are projecting their own obsessions onto our enemies. As is too often the case, Republican moderates are itching to placate these ideologues in order to show how they rise above the fray, reach across the aisle, and transcend all this partisan bickering. That is nuts.

This is not TARP or a phony stimulus bill. Lives are at stake if we get this wrong. Any compromise here benefits al-Qaeda and harms Americans. Moreover, it would only convince the Left, which does not really take national security to heart, that it should cling to its positions, however unpopular, because there will always be some GOP appeasers who convince themselves that being bipartisan is a virtue that outweighs doing the right thing by the country.

We are winning on enemy combatants. We are winning on the fact that they should be treated like war prisoners and tried, if at all, by military commission. We are winning on the fact that they should not be Mirandized but should be detained without trial and interrogated as war prisoners. We are winning on the fact that Gitmo is a fine facility and a far better place to detain and try terrorists than any detention center in the United States. We are winning on these issues not because we are more politically savvy , but because our policies on these matters are the right ones.

There is no reason to compromise on this issue. We should tell the president we are delighted he has had the good sense to keep Gitmo open and to refer at least some of the combatants to military commissions. Now it is time for him to announce that the decision to close Gitmo was a mistake, and that it will remain open for the foreseeable future. Now is the time for him to announce that all of the enemy combatants who are tried will be tried by military commissions, as authorized by Congress. If he won’t agree, then fine: Congress should deny the funds to transfer prisoners out of Gitmo, divest the district courts of jurisdiction to try enemy combatants, and dare the president to empty Gitmo by releasing trained jihadists to other countries where they can plot against the United States. H e won’t dare.

We don’t need to be graceless. There is plenty we can do to make this easier for the president. We can emphasize that he ordered his administration to undertake a thorough study of Gitmo to ensure that it is a top-flight detention camp. We can point out that a good-faith assumption Obama made about closing Gitmo — namely, that he would get a lot of cooperation from our allies — turned out not to be true. We can demonstrate that terrorists who’ve been released — not just by this administration but by the Bush administration — have gone back to the jihad at an alarming rate. Further, we can note that certain curative measures the Obama administration was banking on, such as the Saudi re-education program, have not worked.

Any president would have to adjust to such developments. We can laud the president for acting responsibly in reconsidering his initial decisions about Gitmo after he ordered more troops to Afghanistan, appreciating that any commander-in-chief would want to minimize the flow of trained jihadists joining the battle against our forces. We can note that rather than scrap the military commissions, he made some tweaks to try to improve them. ( True, the changes were all either cosmetic or counterproductive, but there’s no reason to dwell on that.)

In sum, I’m not suggesting that we humiliate the administration. Obama is going to be president for another three years, and we have to make it as easy as we can for him to do the right things — which will often go against his instincts.

But we don’t have to compromise on the things that actually must be done. No civilian trials for war criminals. No closing Gitmo, and no permitting alien jihadists to enter our country so the courts can order them released. Consider these not negotiable. If the administration won’t accept those terms, then tell the president to keep his Gatorade barrel, get back out on the field, and prepare for his side to get its clock cleaned.