I’m greatly reassured by the Obama administration’s early steps: rejecting torture as well as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; ending the military tribunal ‘justice’ system; ending warrantless wiretapping; and beginning the shutdown of Gitmo and the CIA’s secret prisons. I’d prefer Guantanamo Bay closed in 100 days rather than a year, but there are a range of details that matter more than the timeline.
That said, I reject the nonsense that it’s hard to close Gitmo. It’s simple: transfer the prisoners to the U.S. and then figure out what to do with them. It’s the figuring out what to do with them that’s hard. As Yglesias says, there’s no reason storing them in the U.S. is unsafe. Even those that actually are terrorists may act like super villains but they don’t have superpowers. When terrorism suspects escape from captivity in Yemen or the like, it’s because the factions of the government is ambivalent about holding them.
Figuring out which to try and what case we’ve got against them after the tainted fruit of torture is removed is hard. That said, if we want to detain them legally until we work that out, the solution is also fairly simple: grant POW privileges provisionally. Yes, it means that they’ll be accorded certain privileges reserved for enemy soldiers. However, if we want to treat them otherwise we should have to prove they actually have committed the crimes we accuse them of.
Update: Also, we’re not living in a rogue state anymore. How cool is that?
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