Shutting Down Guantanamo Makes No Common Sense

Last week former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s national security policies, including holding “hard core” terror suspects at the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Cheney’s warning that granting rights to, and possibly releasing, hard-core terror suspects would be a mistake comes on the heels of President Obama’s announcement that he plans to shut down Gitmo-a decision a majority of Americans disagree with, for good reason.

Americans are a people of common sense. And shutting down Gitmo doesn’t seem to make very much.

Although the President has already made the decision, it remains to be seen what its ramifications will be.

High-minded arguments about civil liberties aside, the evidence suggests that the U.S. has, if anything, erred on the side of too much liberalism in its handling of the detainees at Guantanamo. And that high-mindedness has cost innocent lives.

Of those inmates released during the Bush years, at least 61 have returned to the fight. Last month it emerged that one of them, Said Al-Shihri, has become al Qaeda’s number two man in Yemen, and is thought to have been involved in the September, 2008 bombing of the U.S. embassy there. That bombing killed ten innocent people, including guards and civilians waiting outside the embassy. Al Shihri is thought to have participated in this violence after the U.S. released him from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where he attended a Saudi “rehabilitation program” for jihadists.

Rehab? For terrorists? Maybe it’s time we realized these are hard core enemy combatants, not Hollywood starlets with a taste for Valium.

Gitmo’s most hysterical detractors paint a picture of the facility as the nexus of Dick Cheney’s evil Death Star, a place where torture is taking place and people disappear, never to be heard from again. That description could aptly describe facilities in Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein, but not Guantanamo.

With all the emotion surrounding Gitmo, few people actually pay attention to the facts about what actually goes on there. Inmates have clean rooms, excellent medical care, access to books and writing materials, and decent meals that provide 4,000 calories a day. They receive visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as consultations with their attorneys.

Each detainee gets to appear yearly before an administrative review board comprised of three military officers. With the aid of their attorneys, detainees can present evidence to argue for their release or relocation. As of last month, a cumulative total of 520 detainees had been relocated or released as a result of this process–far more than the 250 currently being held, whom the Department of Homeland Security describes as “dangerous men” and “enemy combatants [who] represent a threat to the U.S. or our allies.”

The reality is, shutting down Gitmo will usher in a raft of legal complications that will likely result in the release of some hard core detainees, according to Brooke Goldstein, an attorney and director of the Legal Project for Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank dedicated to promoting U.S. interests in the mideast.

“If Guantanamo prisoners are moved to a domestic prison, they will be subject to U.S. law and will be afforded the same rights and constitutional protections of an American citizen,” Goldstein said. “Based on the succession of past cases, it is certain that after they are tried in the U.S., some of these prisoners will be released. If they are released the chances of their rejoining the violent jihadi movement are high.”

Goldstein adds that civil libertarians’ objections to detainees being held without trial fails to take into account that jihadists have declared a war without end against the U.S.

“According to the Geneva Conventions, you can hold enemy combatants for the duration of hostilities until peace has been declared,” she says. “It gets muddied because these guys have declared an indefinite war against the United States and Western civilization.”

Further practical problems that might develop if detainees were moved to U.S. prisons include radicalization of prisoners in U.S. facilities.

“What effect will these prisoners have on other prisoners?” says Goldstein. “We already have a problem of radicalization in our prisons towards a militant version of Islam-do we want to add to that?”

Not to mention that relocating detainees to U.S. cities poses potential problems for communities located within the vicinity of a prison.

“Take into consideration the people who live in these areas,” says Goldstein. “If you are moving people into domestic areas, what kind of threat will you place people who live in the area in?”

With attorneys to advocate for them, and yearly review of their cases, as well as the chance to pray six times a day, the detainees at Guantanamo have more rights and privileges than did German or Japanese prisoners of war during World War II. But unlike Japanese and German soldiers, who were conscripted into armies and had no choice but to fight unless they were willing to be shot for treason, jihadists voluntarily wage war on the U.S. and our allies.

Is it really appropriate or useful for them to believe that, should they be caught planning attacks, high-minded Americans will rush to agitate for their rights, and possibly their release?

It’s just not good common sense.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on February 12, 2009 at 1:54 pm and filed under Commentary. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>