It’s been fun these past few weeks to watch President Obama and the Democrats twist and squirm over the issue of Guantanamo. After spending years scoring cheap political points at the Bush administration’s expense, they are now finding that it’s not so easy to close the detention facility after all. But in spite of all his loose campaign talk, President Obama is coming out in a pretty sensible place on the issue of terrorist detentions, and Republicans would be well-advised to support him instead of continuing their sniping.
In his speech at the National Archives, he said: “Rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.”
That’s more or less the position that Sen. John McCain espoused during the campaign and one that I (having served as a McCain foreign-policy adviser) reluctantly came to agree with after having initially defended Gitmo’s necessity. In the end, I think the facility is a strategic-communications liability even if most of the charges made against it are fictitious. No, it wasn’t a place where innocent Muslims were routinely tortured. But, true or not, such charges are believed by all too many people around the world and, as Obama said, that hurts American security.
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The question the president now faces is what to do with the detainees currently housed at Gitmo. Personally, I don’t see the problem with moving them to secure facilities in the United States — a prospect that has grown senators practically fainting in horror. The arguments against doing so rely more on political demagoguery (“fear mongering,” Obama called it) than on solid evidence. As the president said: “Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal ‘supermax’ prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.” He also quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham as saying: “The idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.”
From a substantive (if not a political) standpoint, the real issue isn’t whether to transfer some of the inmates from Gitmo to equally secure facilities in the U.S. It’s how to adjudicate their cases. Some will be sent to other countries or released — something that President Bush was already doing. As Obama noted, “Over 525 detainees were released from Guantanamo under the Bush administration.”
Obama also said that he would continue sending, “when feasible,” detainees for trial in the federal courts. That’s something that Bush did as well with, among others, Zaccarias Moussaoui, the “20th 9/11 hijacker.”
When that’s not feasible and the detainees in question have violated the “laws of war,” they will be tried through military commissions. Obama tried to pretend he hasn’t flip-flopped on this issue but it’s clear he did, and more power to him. After opposing the commissions as a senator, he recognizes their utility as a commander-in-chief. The adjustments in the rules he has made to cover his change of heart (e.g., making it a bit harder to admit hearsay evidence and giving detainees slightly more latitude in selecting their own lawyers) are largely cosmetic.
The really hard cases — “the toughest issue we will face,” Obama called it — concern those detainees “who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” As on the issue of military commissions and on the release of interrogation photos, it is very much to Obama’s credit that he has broken with the absolutists of the ACLU by pledging to hold in custody some terrorists who cannot be tried either by the federal courts or by the military commissions. He has not yet come up with a mechanism for preventive detention, but he did say, “I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al-Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.”
Assuming Obama sticks to that pledge, he will have formulated a detainee policy that Republicans and Democrats ought to support. Yes, his views now are different from those he espoused as a political candidate. Yes, he’s still trashing his predecessor more than he should. And, yes, he has made some slip-ups in some areas. He should not, for example, have released memos detailing interrogation techniques that could be of use to our enemies.
But on the whole, President Obama is formulating sensible, centrist national-security policies that are a lot closer to those of the Bush administration than anyone might have imagined from listening to Senator Obama. Even his renunciation of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as waterboarding, is essentially an endorsement of decisions already made in Bush’s second term — and Obama, like Bush, has reserved the right to change his mind in a truly dire situation. Conservatives should welcome his pragmatic adjustments rather than criticize him for hypocrisy or insufficient hawkishness.
— Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author most recently of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.
