Guantánamo: Why is it still open?

last updated 8 January 2015

Four years ago, said The Economist in an editorial, Barack Obama vowed to close the “Orwellian” prison at Guantánamo Bay. Last week, amid a mass hunger strike involving at least 100 of the 166 detainees, he revived his call to close it. Guantánamo is “contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests,” said Obama, suggesting that if it weren’t for Congress blocking him, he would have shut this disgraceful gulag down long ago. What a “cop-out,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. The reality is that Obama just abandoned Guantánamo once Republicans started attacking him as “a terrorist-coddling pantywaist.” Now his administration may be violating international law by force-feeding dozens of the striking prisoners, stuffing a greased tube down their noses and throats until they gag and bleed. If Obama now feels shame over “this national embarrassment,” he should: He left those men at Guantánamo out of “political cowardice.”

Now Obama wants to rewrite history, said The Wall Street Journal. He once did advocate closing Guantánamo, but “as a president, he has adopted nearly all of President Bush’s laws-of-war paradigm in practice.” At least 136 detainees are being held under his orders, even though 86 have been cleared for release to jails in their home countries—mostly to Yemen. Why? Because Obama knows some will escape if sent back to unstable, corrupt countries, and rejoin “dozens of other former Guantánamo detainees” who’ve rejoined terrorist organizations. Who cares if jihadists “starve their way to the Great Orgy in the Sky?” asked Andrew C. McCarthy in NationalReview.com. The Guantánamo guards should “deliver the prisoners a heaping halal turkey dinner every day—on videotape. If they choose not to eat it, that’s on them.”

“The criticism of Obama is not entirely fair,” said the Chicago Tribune. Obama did try to transfer the detainees to a federal supermax prison in Illinois, but Congress passed a law barring their transfer to U.S. soil. “To protect Americans from terrorism,” he imposed the moratorium on Yemen releases after the 2009 arrest of a Yemen-trained “underwear bomber.” The reality is that as long as we’re at war with al Qaida, some prisoners will remain at Guantánamo. Obama’s best option is to minimize that number, by negotiating with foreign governments to take as many as we can send elsewhere. It’s hardly ideal, “but an incomplete solution is better than none at all.”