After the Senate voted 90 – 6 against financing President Obama’s plan to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility by January 2010, the President spoke today to reaffirm his commitment to closing the facility. The speech made numerous good points, including an explicit refutation of the ridiculous notion, peddled by both Republicans and Democrats, that the government is incapable of housing Guantánamo inmates in federal supermax prisons.
Suggesting that closing Guantánamo will result in terrorists hanging around by your children’s schools and neighborhood parks is exemplary of the fear-mongering embraced by so many, including Democrats like Harry Reid and Ben Nelson, in Washington. Very dangerous people, murders and violent offenders, are housed in federal supermax prisons around the country and, as Obama pointed out today, not a single one of them has ever escaped. Numerous terrorists have already been tried in civilian courts and are now securely imprisoned in the U.S., clearly refuting the notion that we need a legal black hole in which to arraign and prosecute suspected terrorists. The notion that terrorists somehow pose a more existential threat to America than violent criminals is also patently false. While over 2,000 Americans were killed on September 11th, over 16,000 Americans are killed yearly in homicides. The idea that Guantánamo inmates are the most pressing public safety concern in this country is a product of political pandering to our fears.
This issue has received particular attention after the Pentagon reported that 14 percent of those released from Guantánamo returned to terrorist or militant activities. Given that this is a substantially lower recidivism rate than we see for criminals in domestic prisons, I fail to see how this is a relevant consideration. The logic one uses to infer from this (comparatively low) recidivism rate that we ought never release anyone from Guantánamo would also justify never releasing anybody from U.S. prisons. While releasing people who end up attempting to harm Americans is clearly very undesirable, compare it to the alternative – imprisoning, indefinitely, everyone that the government can connect to terrorist or militant activities. This would represent a tremendous financial and organizational commitment, 86 percent of which, keep in mind, would be wasted. The more pressing issue, however, is that the suspects who were released were released under the Bush’s Guantánamo policies, not Obama’s. The best way to ensure we continue to imprison those who are likely to return to terrorism is to investigate and put on trial, in a systematic way, the suspected terrorists. If there is a better alternative here I would like to see it.
Despite this, the former Vice President spoke today about how closing Guantánamo is a decision that makes America less safe. As The New York Times reported, “the speeches of President Obama and the former vice president outlined a fundamental debate over the proper balance between personal liberties and national security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks.” It is disturbing to see America’s paper of record embracing the absurd false dichotomy between civil liberties and national security. While Obama has been far from perfect on this issue, his categorical rejection of this idea is praiseworthy. Given that Guantánamo, along with the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, are probably the best recruiting tools Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have it seems to me that, if anything, closing Guantánamo is likely to make us safer.
In the end, perhaps the biggest take away from all this is that while many, including HPR’s Alex Copulsky, rightly pointed out that Obama’s biggest obstacle might be the Democratic Congress, it seems Obama is ready to push back. When will Congressional leaders come to their senses and realize that Obama is not vastly more popular than them only because of his oratorical skills, but because he holds reasonable, well thought out positions that do not rely on irrational fear mongering?