The Cleanup Crew

One of the most pressing issues that the newly minted President Obama will face is what to do about the giant clusterfuck called Guantánamo Bay. Bush is going to leave quite a mess behind, even if he doesn’t do anything to make it worse in the next seventy or so days. The Obama camp has already said that the detention camp will be closed, but the question is, what do you do with the people who are already there? Some of the people there undoubtedly have done things that deserve punishment, and a lot of them are innocent of any crime save bad luck. And then there’s the great middle ground of people there, where it’s just hard to say. Thanks to Bush’s torture and treatment policies, it might be impossible to obtain convictions of most of the people there.

I don’t think you can overstate the moral component of why torture and unlawful detention are wrong, but from a practical level it simply doesn’t work. We are holding people we can’t try because of how we’ve treated them, we’ve made their families and countries distrust everything we say and now we have to decide what to do with people who have been in a prison for going on eight years. It isn’t just a moral disaster for the Union, it’s also a practical one: if you wanted to try and fight terrorism, this is about as far as you can get from a way to do it.

The New York Times had an interesting article this weekend dealing with rehabilitating jihadists in Saudi Arabia. Something like this is in order for the men we’ve kept hostage at Guantánamo Bay and our other extralegal detention facilities, known and unknown. As with crime, exercise and diet, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.