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.

Life Inside Guantanamo Bay

The Washington Post has an essay by a Saudi man who was held in Guantanamo Bay for five and a half years. He was never charged with any crimes, and he was released with little explanation in 2007. It’s a pretty harrowing read. Guantanamo Bay and the Bush administration’s decision to hold people in indefinite detention are certainly abhorrent. Jumah al Dossari’s story of being swept up by the Pakistani military and shuffled around until finally arriving in Guantanamo Bay is full of details that ought to give anyone pause: being kept in freezing metal rooms, suicide attempts, beatings and the inexplicable legal proceedings where he was unable to see the evidence the government was using against him.

In all the things I’ve read about Guantanamo Bay and the way the government has pursued the “war on terror,” the biggest question I keep asking myself is, what was this supposed to accomplish? What did the Bush administration think they were going to get out of this? They kept a man who had done nothing wrong in prison without charge for over five years, and then just let him go. When in that time did they discover that al Dossari was no threat, either to himself or to others? Presumably, by releasing this man, the government is admitting that he is not a terrorist. If he isn’t, why did they keep him? If he is, why did they let him go? Why did it take over five years to determine this? This whole operation, Camp X-Ray, the military tribunals, keeping “enemy combatants” in indefinite detention – to what end? These people are not super villains. Even the people in Guantanamo Bay who are terrorists, the lengths that they go to – al Dossari was transported to the camp on a plane, shackled to the floor, wearing black-out goggles and ear muffs – makes no sense. Did they expect him to use superpowers to take over the plane? This central incoherence is what I find truly perplexing about our reaction to terrorism. The mentality that says, “even if it’s wrong, we’ve got to do something” doesn’t make any sense to me. On an individual level, that may be understandable, but as a governing philosophy it creates travesties like the one we find ourselves in now.

Keeping America Safe

Now that we’ve been protected from the diabolical mastermind that is the guy who drove around Osama bin Laden, the Washington Post is reporting that the Defense Department isn’t sure that they’re even going to let the guy go after his sentence is fulfilled. Honestly, if they aren’t planning on letting these guys go, even people like Hamdan who are of little or no importance, what are we planning on doing with them?

What I find truly shocking about the Bush Administration and the abhorrent way they’ve conducted the push back against al Qaeda is not the ugly, illegal way they’ve treated people – we still have people in Guantanamo Bay who are innocent of any crimes – although that’s bad enough – but the impression that they give of not having put any thought at all into what they were going to do down the road.

Seriously, did they just envision keeping these men in a prison until they all died of old age? One reason they don’t want to let them go is the fear that they’ll go back to their old terroristin’ ways. Did we not think about this before we decided to keep these men locked in an extralegal limbo for years and years?

So, my question for you guys. January, 2009, President Obama is sworn in. What does he do with Guantanamo Bay? What does he do with these prisoners? Does he transfer the ones who really were involved in terrorism to federal prisons? What about the innocents that have been rotting away there for years? I really don’t have any idea. But it certainly is something that bears thinking about.