When Obama took office one of his goals was the shuttering of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. From MTV:
A long time ago, Senator Barack Obama explained why the detention facility at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay needed to close. “Our legitimacy is reduced when we’ve got a Guantanamo that is open,” he said during a debate in June 2007. “Those kinds of things erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles.”
More than eight years later, after getting a significant promotion, he hasn’t changed his mind. “For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our security,” President Obama said on Tuesday at the White House. “It undermines it. … This is about closing a chapter in our history.”
Upon announcement of the transfer of 15 more detainees to the United Arab Emirates (leaving 61 still resident, from a high of nearly 800), Benjamin Wittes publishes a comment on Lawfare:
First, this is a significant accomplishment, in my opinion. Getting detainees out of Guantanamo is very hard. There is both an intensive internal review process and, for those detainees who clear that process, there’s the additional hurdle—sometimes a very time-consuming hurdle—of finding a country that will take the detainee subject to the security and humane assurances that the review process and other U.S. legal and policy constraints demand. The result are two backlogs: the backlog of detainees who cannot be cleared for transfer, and the backlog of detainees who are cleared but cannot be removed. This one action clears 43 percent of the second backlog. Before it, there were 35 detainees at Guantanamo cleared for transfer; now there are only 20.
Second, with this transfer, Obama is getting rather close to the point at which keeping Guantanamo open looks just plain silly. I’ve never much cared whether Guantanamo closes or not. I dislike the symbolic politics of the “Close Guantanamo” movement about as much as I dislike the chest-thumping symbolic politics of the Guantanamo-is-toughness crowd. If Obama manages to remove a substantial fraction of the remaining 20 people cleared for transfer and Hillary Clinton maintains his policy of not bringing new detainees to the site (Donald Trump promises to revitalize detention there, so if he wins the presidency, the point is moot), the notion of maintaining an entire detention facility for the long-term detention of as few as 40 or so detainees will become increasingly hard to sustain. Guantanamo is not Spandau Prison, and it doesn’t make much sense to maintain it for the sake of maintaining it.
Just plain silly. How much longer will Congress obstruct the closing of Guantánamo Bay?
The ACLU is not entirely happy with the Administration’s approach to rendering Guantánamo Bay meaningless:
Yet the Obama administration is seeking to “close” Guantánamo by transferring some detainees — most of whom who have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charge or trial — to a prison in the United States. This is not the way to close Guantánamo. Importing indefinite detention and unfair military commissions would just create “Guantánamo North” on American soil, entrenching the prison’s blight on our nation’s core values and the rule of law. And it will perpetuate, and possibly worsen, the agony of men denied an end to their plight.
Closing Guantánamo the right way requires ending indefinite detention without charge or trial; transferring detainees who have been cleared for transfer; and trying detainees for whom there is evidence of wrongdoing in our federal criminal courts here in the U.S. Our federal courts routinely handle high-profile terrorism cases. If a prosecutor cannot put together a case against a detainee, there is no reason that person should continue to be imprisoned, whether in Guantánamo or the United States.
