President Obama on Tuesday released a new plan to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the U.S. has held hundreds of suspected jihadists since January 2002. The president had made closing the facility one of his “day one” priorities after he took office in 2009. But Democrats and Republicans in Congress opposed the effort, citing national security concerns. Under the new proposal, the White House would move as many as 60 of the 91 remaining prisoners to the United States for trial or continued detention. Has the time come to shutter Gitmo? Or are some detainees just too risky to move?
Joel Mathis
Gitmo is a stain on America’s honor. That’s true, forever, if it closes today — and it would still be true even if the camp had been closed, as it should’ve been, seven years ago.
Understand: There’s nothing wrong with taking or keeping prisoners of war.
But torture is wrong. It is illegal. And both of those facts were true in the early years after 9/11, when prisoners in American custody were tortured at the base. No less an authority than the International Red Cross said so, reporting that the camp was designed to break the will of prisoners using “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.”
“The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,” the organization reported in 2004.
Before Gitmo, Americans knew torture was wrong. George Washington prohibited it of his soldiers. Ronald Reagan signed an international treaty making it illegal. When torture was depicted in the movies, it was almost always the bad guys performing it. Communists. Terrorists. Villains. Now? Crowds cheer Donald Trump when he tells them that “torture works.”
Simply put: Gitmo has made a shambles of America’s claim to moral leadership in the world. We’ve forgotten how to be the good guys. We’ve forgotten to be ashamed of evil.
These days, we’re told, Gitmo must remain open because its few remaining prisoners are too dangerous to bring to American soil. At best, this is cowardice on the part of our leaders; at worst, it’s just cynical pandering by politicians who are all too happy to let Americans stew in fear. We’ve forgotten how to be ashamed of those characteristics, as well.
“I think it’s in the best interest in the nation” to close Gitmo, former Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said. “And it’s in the best interest in our moral authority around the world.” That authority has largely been squandered; closing Gitmo would be a modest step toward reclaiming it
Ben Boychuk
The case for closing Guantanamo Bay in 2016 is no better than the case for closing Guantanamo Bay in 2009. The main difference is that President Obama has had nearly eight years to empty the facility, reducing the population to just 91 remaining detainees.
But Obama’s new plan overcomes none of the longstanding objections to closing down Gitmo. Appeals to cost savings are weak. Moral appeals are weaker. These are bad men. Of the 685 detainees that have been released through January 2015, at least 116 returned to terrorism or insurgent activity.
Perhaps more important than sentimental appeals to national honor is a dispassionate assessment of the national interest. The president’s plan speaks vaguely of 13 U.S. prisons that might accommodate former Gitmo detainees, but mentions no names for good reason: nobody wants them.
Don’t forget why the Guantanamo prison exists in the first place. No, it wasn’t set up to torture prisoners with impunity. The facility was the least bad option the United States had for holding enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. These are people who violated the laws of war, but whose crimes don’t fall easily under the purview of civilian courts.
The alternative to keeping them where they are would be putting them on trial or releasing them. Some of the Gitmo detainees are working their way through the Pentagon’s byzantine military tribunal system. Transferring other detainees to prisons on U.S. soil would put them well within the jurisdiction of judges who would insist the detainees be tried or cut loose. Cut loose where?
Right now, if the courts rule that the government has no good reason for holding a detainee, the government keeps the detainee in custody at Guantanamo until it has found a foreign country willing to take him. That may not be possible if a detainee is held in a federal prison.
It’s easy to say that closing Gitmo would improve America’s standing in the world without much in the way of evidence supporting the claim. The truth is, the jihadists don’t care about where the United States is holding their comrades-in-arms. They care only that we’re holding them at all.
This piece was originally distributed by Tribune News Services
This piece originally appeared in Tribune News Service