Guantánamo: Not so easily closed

For the Obama administration, it’s a heaping helping of “humble pie,” said Michael Goldfarb in TheWeeklyStandard.com. White House officials admitted last week they wouldn’t be able to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by President Obama’s January 2010 deadline. Obama’s aides are blaming the Bush administration for keeping messy records on the 223 remaining detainees, the international community for refusing to accept but a handful of them, and even the American people, who rose up in opposition to settling hardened al Qaida killers in U.S. prisons. Closing Guantánamo by year’s end isn’t the only promise Obama is breaking, said Charles Stimson in National Review. He is also now backing out of his campaign pledge to ask Congress for legislation creating a legal basis for holding accused terrorists indefinitely. Instead, the administration will let decisions about the fate of individual detainees fall to the federal courts, allowing Obama to sidestep responsibility when scores of detainees are released. What a “stunning display of political cowardice.”

It’s a “sham” all right, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com, but not because Obama is secretly hoping to set detainees free. His administration has submitted legal briefs embracing the discredited “Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments” that terrorism suspects “lack any constitutional rights whatsoever.” It’s now clear that the White House intends merely to move many of the Guantánamo detainees to some other lawless hell—maybe Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan—where they will continue to be held indefinitely without charge. As a symbol of the Bush administration’s contempt for the Constitution, Guantánamo should surely be closed. But why close it only to re-create its “defining traits—indefinite detentions with no trials”—at another location?

So don’t close it, said Anne Marie Dew in The Christian Science Monitor. I’ve just visited Guantánamo, and it’s certainly a “dreadful place,” defined by barbed wire, leg and hand shackles, and occasional outbursts of “piercing hatred” from powerless inmates. But many of those inmates are sworn enemies of the U.S., and we have to put them somewhere. The best place is Gitmo, a remote and secure location that also now has “the most highly secured, most technologically advanced courtroom in the world.” The legal and moral problems associated with detaining enemy combatants will continue to vex us no matter where these prisoners are located. “There is no geographic cure for Gitmo.”