President Elect Obama has repeatedly promised to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He either will or he won't, and right now there is no telling. The question then is what he will do with the detainees.
Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard does a little investigative journalism and discovers that a lot of the persons held at the terrorist detention facility are terrorists. Exactly how many clearly fall into that category is a good question, and President Obama will get to ponder it. But he is smart enough that a few more questions will surely occur to him: what if I order the release of someone who then goes on to commit a new act of terrorism? What if this hypothetical post-detainee manages to kill more than a few Americans? What will that do to my Presidency, or to the people's patience with things like human rights?
It is interesting to note that Obama's choice for Attorney General, Eric Holder, has endorsed Bush's policy at Gitmo. Powerline directs us to Cliff May at the Wall Street Journal, who gives us this juicy quote from Eric Holder:
One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.
That seems to me to be about right. The Geneva Convention was a classic social contract between nations: every nation is to abide by these rules in war and in return all our soldiers get certain protections when they become prisoners of war. But that only works if the corollary is: violate these rules and you lose the protections.
The fact that we are talking about the rights of these scoundrels is largely a result of the Bush Administration's success at preventing another terrorist attack. If you want to keep talking about rights and due process you have to make sure the next attack doesn't happen. Here, again, is Joscelyn:
The new administration will soon discover from its review of the Guantánamo files what motivated its predecessor: The scope of the terrorist threat was far greater than anyone knew on September 11, 2001. But for the Bush administration's efforts, many more Americans surely would have perished.
This conclusion is based on a careful review of the thousands of pages of documents released from Guantánamo, as well as other publicly available evidence.
President-elect Obama has a lot to chew on here. I am guessing that when we really get to meet the new boss, he will be rather the same as the old boss.
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