there were a lot of people who expected Gitmo was going to be shut down very quickly and felt the reasons being given as to why it might be more complicated than that were just Bush babble.
Who thought that? No one with any understanding of the clusterfuck that is that prison, and the legal entanglements surrounding it. Bush wasn’t serious about closing the place, and the difference we have with Obama is that he’s ceased these kangaroo court tribunals.
Well maybe you should cool it on criticizing Obama for things you read in half-retarded blog comments.
…and set an actual deadline for it closing. Jesus, people, did you think he was going to start setting the dynamite right after the swearing in, and just leave the prisoners standing around outside of the prison shrugging?
But, dude, THEY’RE GONNA BE IN OUR BACK YARD!
Chill, folks. A lot of people assumed shutting Gitmo down was going to be simple. That all of the reasons it was going to be a complex issue that might take up to a year to work out was just Bush admin BS.
Like who?
I’m willing to admit I was one of those random blog commenters that thought it would be simple and fast to close Gitmo. I’m also willing to admit that it’s probable that the Bush administration has created such an ethical and legal quagmire that it’s going to take some time to put things right.
We’re currently in violation of the Geneva conventions and the Constitution of the United States. Coming up with a solution that restores the rule of law and is politically feasible must be a complete nightmare. I’m just glad the new administration is jam packed with people who are probably smart enough to make it work. (Crossing fingers)
Also – Dahlia Lithwick’s article in Slate on Thursdayhas a decent run down of the issues. Seems like there needs to be a determination of who’s dangerous and who’s not, then a legal structure created to deal with the dangerous guys.
Wow, “a lot of people” thought that shutting down a prison of dubious legality, filled with foreign nationals whose home countries no longer want them, and where the evidence against them was either obtained through coercion or is classified was going to be simple?
Who are these amazing people, jeff? Because I read lots of progressive blogs and get those incessant weekly missives from the ACLU, and I’ve never read anything like that anywhere.
Nobody thought it was simple - we just didn’t (and don’t) believe it was impossible, which is what Bush & Co would have us believe.
Probably the same people that were complaining (bitterly) that Obama hadn’t lifted the global gag rule on the 22nd, the anniversary of Roe v Wade, because it would have served their sense of symbolism. (He reversed the policy on the 23rd.)
From a discussion I had with a prolific poster on this very issue, in January:
“I have no idea why you think this is complicated.”
“I suspect the reason it’s “so hard” is the government is still playing cute with (we think they’re guilty but can’t prove it.) Remember that until Obama is in office and cleans out the stack of lying shits he’s installed you can’t believe a word they say.”
“I think Obama’s playing nice with the “reasonable” Washington establishment that fell for all of Bush’s shit on this. It’s not actually complicated at all, for the reasons I pointed out.”
That’s just a representative sample.
The Bush administration threw as many intentional landmines into this as they could.
And now the Pentagon is making up lies about recidivist terrorists. It’s a zombie narrative that, by the way, directly contradicts the “Bush kept us safe” storyline, but is somehow are only being reported as “We can’t ever let anyone go from Gitmo ever!”
Jeff, I think the underlying issues are simple. It’s a tissue of lies. If Obama doesn’t want to just steamroll all the Bushies still hanging around he’s going to have to jump through hoops, though.
Alright, if it’s so simple, how would you try the prisoners that we have cases against, and what would you do with the ones that we don’t whose home countries won’t take them back?
On how to try them, there’s a wide range of possibilities - from jury trials to less-stupid military trails. However, no one’s actually ever up-front explained, to my knowledge, whether we think it should be easier to convict them than in a US citizen jury case, or why. The de facto implementation Bush came up with that we wanted show trials to justify detaining “maybe terrorists” for all eternity.
Personally, I think the standards of evidence and conviction shouldn’t be significantly different than how we’d normally try a non-US citizen for something. You can create backwards-facing rationalizations about why this is a good idea (someone guilty might go free!), but I haven’t heard a from-first-principles derivation of why a legal system like that would make any sense.
If they’re guilty, we lock them up in the appropriate security level prison, and we apply the same recividism assessment methods we do for other prisoners to them. If a murder goes on about how he’s going to kill everyone he sees when you let him out you obviously don’t let him out, and we have handling methods for that.
If they’re not guilty, they go wherever. If no one takes them, they get asylum - after all, we did detain them for years on charges they were apparently innocent of.
All the “controversy” is about a potential situation where someone’s guilty, but somehow not guilty enough to prove it, so we let them go and they immediatelly car bomb us. I think it’s largely the same stupid hypothetical as the “Jack Bauer tortures a cute baby seal to save New York City” scenario - give me a break, it doesn’t actually exist. If by some miracle it does than whatever, but now that Obama’s in charge instead of the liars I suspect we’ll get zero cases like it.
This is actually fairly simple:
[ul]
[li]Ship every prisoner in Gitmo to prisons in the United States
[/li][li]Shutdown Gitmo
[/li][li]Review each individual case
[/li][li]Prosecute those for which we have non-coerced evidence
[/li][li]Repatriate “detainees” we cannot prosecute whose countries will take them
[/li][li]Ship the rest to the several European nations willing to take them[/ul]This isn’t difficult, but it will undoubtedly be a somewhat lengthy process (several months). Then again they have been rotting in prison for several years so relatively speaking it shouldn’t take too long.
[/li]
As Glen Greenwald notes here, we have successfully prosecuted several terrorists in the past. There’s no reason to create a new system when what we have is sufficient.
[/li]
And by “several months” you mean “several years”. Do you have any notion of how long it can take even non-hideously politically sensitive court cases to be resolved? Even getting the prisoners shipped to various prisons is going to be a painful super NIMBYfied process.
Yeah, I don’t really get it. What’s our recidivist rate for normal prisons here in the US? They expect Gitmo is going to be 0%? We put these people on trial or let them go because that’s the right thing to do. It’s not like they are this guy:
Err, why? It’s not like they’re putting them in up apartment buildings next to elementary schools; they’ll probably go to the existing supermaxs.
[/li]
Yes, that’s a great plan. It’s also incredibly involved and time-consuming, and the only difference between this plan and what’s actually happening is that the prisoners are going to be physically stored in Guantanamo while the rest of this is happening, instead of them being stored just as illegally and fuzzily at random prisons in the US. Either one of those is distasteful but necessary, but when you take the “no more torture” order into account as well, the only difference I can see between the two is that moving them to the US would actually take slightly more time because it’s an extra step that would only result in a symbolic victory.
I think a year or close to it is about right to go through all of that.