November 22nd 2008
Gitmo Blues
In his 60 Minutes interview last week, prez-elect Obama repeated his commitment to closing Guantanamo:
I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that. I’ve said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.
“Regaining America’s moral stature in the world” is an admission by Obama that he believes America was in the wrong with Guantanamo, not the people being held there. We know from a previous Obama Drama entry what’s wrong with his plans to treat these jihadists as mere criminals; now Thomas Joscelyn, writing in The Weekly Standard, gives us a look at the moral stature of the people we’re talking about here:
The most dangerous men currently incarcerated at Guantánamo are the 14 “high value” detainees. The Bush administration gave them this designation because they are uniquely lethal, having planned and participated in the most devastating terrorist attacks in history. Their collective dossier includes, among other attacks, 9/11, the American embassy bombings (August 7, 1998), the USS Cole bombing (October 12, 2000), and the Bali bombings (October 12, 2002). They are responsible for murdering thousands of civilians around the globe, from the eastern United States to Southeast Asia. Had they not been captured, they surely would have murdered thousands more.
The 14 were originally held not at Guantánamo, but at even more controversial black sites. And the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that have sparked international outrage were principally designed for them. One may doubt the necessity and morality of these techniques, including waterboarding, while still recognizing a fundamentally important point: The 14 high value detainees are not ordinary criminals, but perpetrators of an entirely different order of evil.
It is because of these men, in particular, that the Bush administration initiated the preventive detention regime of which Guantánamo is a part. Processing them as mere lawbreakers would not have advanced the war on terror. To read them their rights and provide them lawyers would have been to throw away their intelligence value. It would have allowed them to carry to the grave many details of still active terrorist plots. The Bush administration chose a different route-harsh interrogations designed to ferret out al Qaeda’s current operations before it was too late to stop them or capture those involved.
This information has been available to the media since an AP FOI request was honored in 2006, but once the Mainly Marginalized Media got a whiff of the stink eminating from the Guantanamo cells, it saw little reason to delve deepter into the documentation and report on it – until the NYT snuck in a story the very day before the election.
Obama could still come up with an alternative form of detention beyond our court system, but he’s held up the first WTC trial as a model – even though many of those involved in the plot were not tried, and even though the global terror network continued to grow exponentially after the trial concluded. If indeed Obama moves forward to shuffle the high value targets at Guantanamo into the US court system, Joscelyn concludes:
If the new administration follows the vision set forth by candidate Obama, terrorists such as KSM, Binalshibh, al-Baluchi, and al-Hawsawi will be tried in our federal courts with the same constitutional protections as American citizens including the presumption of innocence. But trying elite terrorists for their crimes does nothing to expose the unconsummated plots they had already set in motion at the time of their capture. Had the Bush administration taken this approach, it is likely that America would have failed to stop many al Qaeda terrorist operations that were in fact foiled.
If you question that, remember that the information we got from KSM led directly to the capture of entire terrorist cells that were in the midst of planning future attacks.
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