Sunday
Jun272010
Obama's Broken Promise: Guantanamo Will Not Close (Savage)
Sunday, June 27, 2010 at 7:19 
The blessing of the news, in this article by Charlie Savage in The New York Times is far from surprising. EA argued as early as the first week of the Obama Administration that the President's declaration that he would close the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay would be challenged and undermined by his own officials. And, even without that subversion, the process was bound to be beset by legal and political complexities.Still, to have this coldly set out --- it's not just that Guantanamo did not close by Obama's promised date of 31 January 2010; it will not close by 31 December or, indeed, in 2011 or 2012 --- is harsh confirmation. The bottom line, beyond the rationalisations, is that many people around the world have seen Guantanamo as a powerful symbol of the hypocrisy and danger of American power. Now they may see it as a symbol as a failure of Barack Obama to deliver on his promises to re-shape that power for co-operation rather than punishment.
Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.
When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.
“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.
And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”
The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.
“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.
Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.
“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.
The politics of closing the prison have clearly soured following the attempted bombings on a plane on Dec. 25 and in Times Square in May, as well as Republican criticism that imprisoning detainees in the United States would endanger Americans. When Mr. Obama took office a slight majority supported closing it. By a March 2010 poll, 60 percent wanted it to stay open.
One administration official argued that the White House was still trying. On May 26, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee reiterating the case.
But Mr. Levin portrayed the administration as unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence, contrasting its muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with “very vocal” threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes.
Read rest of article....
Reader Comments (5)
Scott,
Re your intro above, what hidden meaning should we ascribe to: " EA argued as early as the first week of the Obama Ahmadinejad ..." ? :-)
Related: The Audacity of Hoax: Obama and the Islamic World
Muhammad Sahimi, June 22, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/muhammad-sahimi/the-audacity-of-hoax-obam_b_621876.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/muhammad-sahimi/t...
Catherine,
The not-so-hidden confusion of an editor moving between Washington and Tehran :)
Scott
I used to be deeply opposed to the continuing existence of the Guantánamo Bay prison for the reasons stated by Scott above. When it became clear that the Obama administration was looking for a "new Guantánamo" in the US (such as the Thomson Corrections Center in Illinois), and was just going to replace one facility with the other and continue to hold some detainees indefinitely, I had exactly the same thought. If the policy (curriculum) is not going to change, why close it down? Why waste the money and all kinds of other resources?
Obama is realizing that he is Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on earth, but that it is under constant attack. He is realizing that he must behave more like the Commander-in-Chief, as his hero, President Abraham Lincoln did during the American Civil War. Lincoln in fact suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and he established military commissions for civilians. Lincoln was villified by his enemies for this, but Lincoln stuck to his objective: Preserve the Union at all costs. Obaama must do the same, and focus on winning the Global War on Terror every day. Keeping Gitmo open would help him do this.
For the real story of detention and medical duty at Gitmo, see my book, "Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior." I was the ranking U.S. Army Medical Department officer there from February to June 2002. I tell about what it's like to have to take care of people every day you know would like to kill you.