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ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES: a new series of critical pamphlets from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist
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ON JAN. 22, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order calling for the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to be closed within one year. The president was sworn in just a few days before and had an ambitious agenda, ranging from health care reform to passing a massive financial package in a struggling economy. Still, the decision to close Gitmo was a top priority. It was one of the new president’s first acts in office.
Jan. 22,2010, came and went. Gitmo is still open. There were approximately 250 detainees held at Gitmo on Obama’s inauguration day. More than one year later, most of them remain. It is clear now, if it wasn’t at the time, that President Obama’s decision was based on a profound ignorance of the facility as well as of the detainees held there. Incredibly, President Obama decided to order Gitmo shuttered before he or his advisers knew the first thing about the detainees or how his administration was going to handle their complex cases. It would take months for President Obama’s team to complete even an initial review of the detainees’ dossiers.
Why, then, was the new president in such a hurry to close Guantanamo?
During the signing ceremony for his much ballyhooed executive order, President Obama explained that closing Guantanamo, along with ending the CIA’s interrogation program, would return America to the “moral high ground” and “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”
Obama would make the same arguments again, along with some new ones, when speaking at the National Archives on May 21, 2009. Since inauguration day, the public debate over Obama’s counterterrorism policies had grown. Thus, Obama felt it necessary to defend his policies, including the decision to close Gitmo. It is worth quoting the president’s reasoning at length.
There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law - a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
Let us evaluate the president’s arguments. The first sentence is remarkable, but not in a good way. By arguing that Guantanamo had “set back” America’s “moral authority,” President Obama was implicitly accusing the U.S. military of operating a morally compromised enterprise. Earlier in his speech, Obama explained that “fidelity to our values” is the reason “why America has benefited from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp, moral contrast with our adversaries.” The implication was that Guantanamo, as well as other counterterrorism measures taken by the Bush administration, had blurred the distinction between America and her terrorist enemies.
President George W. Bush said that he too wanted to close Guantanamo, but he never claimed it was a moral imperative. It is true that many in the U.S. and around the world have complained about Guantanamo’s image problem. But that image has always been more myth than reality. There was no good reason for President Obama, in essence, to endorse the myth.
Undoubtedly, a handful of harsh interrogations were carried out at Guantanamo during the early months of the facility. Mohammed al Qahtani (the would-be 20 th hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001) and Mohamedou Ould Slahi (who recruited at least two of the four suicide hijack pilots for al Qaeda to use in the Sept. 11 operation) were subjected to specially approved, and rough, interrogation methods. There have been other isolated incidents of detainee abuse as well.
President George W. Bush said that he too wanted to close Guantanamo, but he never claimed it was a moral imperative.
But the idea that Guantanamo is a torture and abuse mill is largely a fabrication created by people who accept everything jihadists say at face value. The vast majority of detainees were never subjected to any abusive measures, let alone tortured. And Guantanamo was long ago brought into compliance with the Geneva Conventions, even though terrorists are quite obviously not signatories to the accord. Copies of Common Article 3 are even posted in every detention camp at Gitmo, including the most secure facilities, where detainees hurl “feces cocktails” at guards every day.
President Obama’s own attorney general, Eric Holder, told the press that Guantanamo is a “well-run” detention facility with no hint of detainee mistreatment after he visited the facility in February 2009. “I was impressed by the people who are presently running the camp,” Holder said. “I think the facilities there are good ones.”
Thus, even if President Obama wanted to close Gitmo in order to put an end to misconceptions about the military facility, there was no need to effectively endorse them.
Next, President Obama said the Bush administration’s defense of Guantanamo “undermined the rule of law,” and “part of the rationale” for establishing the facility in the first place was that it would be “beyond the law.” This is a common left-wing talking point. The idea that Gitmo is a violation of the “rule of law” is rooted in the fantasy that the camp is some sort of law enforcement center or prison. It is not. Guantanamo is a military detention facility that is intended, first and foremost, to detain enemy combatants so they are prevented from doing further harm.
America has detained hundreds of thousands of combatants in a similar fashion during previous wars without granting them a lawyer or a trial. As President Obama noted during his speech at the National Archives, the Supreme Court granted Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. But that was unprecedented in a time of war. And, as we shall see, the habeas corpus rulings by district court judges have also been inconsistent with defending American security.
In addition to being a detention facility, Guantanamo provides a platform for military and intelligence professionals to gain invaluable intelligence about America’s terrorist enemies. Here is just a small sample of what they have learned.
In June 2002, a “senior Moroccan official” told CNN that the CIA had provided Moroccan authorities with the intelligence they needed to stop a terrorist plot against ships in the Strait of Gibraltar. The intelligence was garnered “from a suspected al Qaeda member in custody” at Gitmo. Another detainee, according to The Washington Post, showed intelligence officials how he would construct a bomb that “could be attached underwater to the hull of a ship.” Although