President-elect Obama seems to have come lately to a realization that most of the people listed in any phone book could have enlightened him about years ago. Closing Guantanamo Bay is going to prove a lot more difficult than just closing it.
During the campaign candidate Obama pontificated on our need to regain the moral high road and shut down a facility that had become a symbol of American peccability and a source of international dirty looks. Not wanting to incur the opprobrium of human rights paragons like Saudi Arabia and honorable people like the French, candidate Obama promised that he would close down Guantanamo Bay just as soon as he hung his coat in the Oval Office closet on Inauguration day. This sent thrills up the legs of lefties at MSNBC and HuffPo who, throughout the summer and fall, were heard bursting into spontaneous choruses of Adeste Fidelis.
Well, that was then when he needed lefty votes to get nominated and elected. This is now, and what was true about Gitmo then is not true now. The scales have fallen from the President-elect's eyes, he has to decide what to do with the barbarians housed at that facility, and he no longer has the option of voting present.
Indeed, what exactly will we do with a couple hundred hard-core Islamic Hannibal Lectors? Just let them go? Send them to their country of origin? Put them on trial (which for many of them will result in either letting them go or sending them home)?
Among those in Congress demanding that Gitmo be shut down there seems to be an epidemic of NIMBY (Not In My BackYard). Our pious congressional panjandrums insist that we bring these killers to trial or release them forthwith, except none of them wants them released in his or her district.
We could, of course, return the incorrigibles to their nation of origin, but Bush hasn't done that already, you'll be surprised to learn, because there they would be subject to real torture, not the kind of relatively innocuous coercion they experienced at Gitmo. What some who are calling for the closing of Gitmo fail to realize is that after a week in an Egyptian prison the detainees themselves will long for the days when the very worst that the very worst detainees had to endure was shackles, shivers, sleep deprivation, the sensation of drowning and being talked to crossly by female interrogators. This horrid treatment was, of course, sandwiched between sumptuous meals, daily prayers, and soccer games none of which they're likely to have much access to in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
If, on the other hand, we put these thugs on trial they'll be tried as criminals rather than as combatants which means the standard of evidence will be set high, and, as Obama told George Stephanopolous last Sunday, the evidence may be "tainted" if the detainees weren't advised of their Miranda rights by the Marines who apprehended them. The courts will then be obligated to drop the charges and these orcs would be free to go and fly more airplanes into more skyscrapers. Indeed, Reuters reports that the army believes that as many as sixty one detainees released from Guantanamo have already returned to terrorist activity.
Barack Obama sounds as if all of this is just beginning to dawn on him which makes one wonder if he's ever really thought about it before or whether he's just been parroting left-wing nostrums that he overheard at the knee of mentors like Jeremiah Wright. And if he hasn't really thought about this what else hasn't he thought about?
Happy Inauguration Day.
RLC