By Rich Lowry
Friday, January 23, 2015
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was
an advertisement for his ideological fixity, and so he reiterated his unbending
determination to close down the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Gitmo is to him what Carthage was to Cato the Elder. It
is an obsession, and it must not stand.
One of his first acts as president was to sign an
executive order to close it down (having no idea what that would entail), and
if he has to, he will send Marine One to evacuate the last of the detainees as
he leaves office in January 2017.
He had in mind what would be his hard-left foreign-policy
legacy long ago, no matter what the prudential considerations or the
circumstances. He wanted to “end” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Empty out
Gitmo. And forge openings with Cuba and Iran.
Gitmo has never been an ideal arrangement. But it is
hardly a national disgrace, either.
At the inception of the war on terror, the United States
was confronted with a problem: What to do with people we knew to be dangerous
but couldn’t readily try in our civilian courts? All these years later, that is
still the crux of the issue.
Obama makes a practical and moral case against the
prison. The practical case is, as he said Tuesday night, that terrorists use
Gitmo to recruit. At times, he has called the facility “probably the No. 1
recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations.”
That is laughable. The president won’t say that violent
extremists are motivated by Islam, but he is certain that they are motivated by
Guantanamo Bay. To believe his rhetoric, radical Islam isn’t a threat, but
radical opposition to Guantanamo Bay is.
Of course, terrorists don’t lack for justifications for
terror. They were attacking us before anyone had thought of Gitmo, and they
will be attacking us once it is shuttered.
Remember when the Iraq War was the greatest terrorist
recruiting tool? Since we have gotten out of Iraq, there are probably more
terrorists, who are certainly better equipped and hold more territory, than at
the height of the war there.
We could curl up in a passive and inoffensive crouch, and
that still wouldn’t stop radical Islam from attacking us. Its drive to kill and
dominate emanates from the insatiable vortex of a totalitarian ideology.
As for the moral case, the president expressed it in the
State of the Union with that preening cliché, “It’s not who we are.”
We aren’t the kind of people who hold enemy combatants
during wartime? As a general proposition, this is false and nonsensical, and
Gitmo in particular by now is more than a blip. It has been open since 2002. It
still houses more than 100 detainees, and congressional majorities repeatedly
have thrown up obstacles to closing it.
If the sin of Gitmo is holding enemy combatants without
trial, that is going to happen no matter what. Even Obama’s own task force to
study Gitmo several years ago concluded that, at that time, there were 48
detainees “too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution.”
If, as the administration prefers, these type of
detainees go to Fort Leavenworth, then that prison would merely become the next
alleged stain on American honor.
The reason to keep Gitmo open is that we can’t trust
other countries to hold the worst of the worst. The rough recidivism rate of
all detainees released from Gitmo so far is 30 percent. A risk of bringing them
here to be jailed is that judges, prone to imposing their policy preferences,
will find a way to order their release.
In 2013, Obama called Gitmo “a symbol around the world
for an America that flouts the rule of law.” Maybe it would be less so if the
president of the United States didn’t partake of the cheap moral umbrage over
it.
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