Aletho News

Guantanamo and presidential priorities

By Glenn Greenwald | June 26, 2010

The headline from this morning’s New York Times article by Charlie Savage says it all — not just about this issue but about the administration generally:

Closing Guantanamo Fades as a priority

Savage writes that it is “unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013”; quotes Sen. Carl Levin as saying that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration; and describes how Sen. Lindsey Graham — who is actually trying to close the camp — is deeply frustrated with the White House’s refusal to spend time or energy to do so, quoting him as saying that the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.”  So that appears to be a consensus:  Guantanamo — the closing of which was one of Obama’s central campaign promises — will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law.

None of this is news to anyone even casually watching what’s been going on, but there are several aspects of this article which are so noteworthy for illustrating how this administration works.  Let’s begin with this:  Obama officials — cowardly hiding behind anonymity as usual — raise the typical excuse which they and their defenders perpetually invoke for their “failures” to fulfill their campaign positions:  it’s all Congress’ fault (“They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame,” Savage writes).  It’s true that Congress has enacted measures to impede the closing of Guantanamo, and threatened to enact others, but the Obama administration’s plan was never so much to close Guantanamo as to simply re-locate it to Thompson, Illinois (GTMO North), in the process retaining one of its key, defining features — indefinite, due-process-free detention — that made it such a menace in the first place (that’s the attribute that led Candidate Obama to scorn it as a “legal black hole”).

The only meaningful way to “close Guantanamo” is to release the scores of detainees whom the administration knows are innocent and then try the rest in a real court (as Pakistan just did with Americans they accused of Terrorism).  Imprisoning only those people whom you convict of crimes is a terribly radical, purist, Far Leftist concept, I know — the Fifth Amendment is so very un-Pragmatic and pre-9/11 — and that is something the administration therefore refused from the start even to consider.

But more important — and this goes to the heart of the debate I had all week with Obama defenders over his alleged inability to influence Congress — the primary reason why Congress has acted to impede the closing of Guantanamo is because the Obama White House has allowed it to, and even encouraged it to do so with its complete silence and inaction.  I was accused by various Obama defenders all last week of being politically ignorant for arguing that Obama possesses substantial means of leverage to influence Congress to do what he wants, and that often, when the excuse is made that it’s not Obama’s fault because he can’t control Congress, the reality is that Congress is doing what it does because the White House is content with or even supportive of that, while pretending in public to lament it.  I provided numerous examples proving that was true, none of which was answered, but one need not believe me and my starry-eyed political ignorance.  Just listen to Carl Levin, who sort of knows how the process works given that he’s been in the Senate for about 400 years, explaining the real reason Guantanamo will not close:

“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 . . . . .

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.

Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Mr. Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantánamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Mr. Levin said of White House officials. “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

That — what Levin just said there — is the heart of the critique of the Obama administration which its defenders steadfastly refuse to address, opting instead to beat the same strawman over and over no matter how many times it’s pointed out what they’re doing… Full article

June 26, 2010 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes