[Peace-discuss] Democrats Continue to Delude Themselves About Obama's Failed Guantánamo Vow

Thu Aug 13 08:13:51 EDT 2015

<https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/12/democrats-continue-lie-obamas
-failed-guantanamo-vow/> Democrats Continue to Delude Themselves About
Obamas Failed Guantánamo Vow

 <https://firstlook.org/theintercept/staff/glenn-greenwald/> Description:
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/02/Glenn-Gree
nwald-Original_350.jpgGlenn Greenwald

Aug. 12 2015, 8:09 a.m.

As everyone knows, closing Guantánamo was a centerpiece of the 2008 Obama
campaign. In the Senate and then in the presidential campaign, Obama
repeatedly and  <http://www.salon.com/2009/04/11/bagram_3/> eloquently
railed against the core, defining evil of Guantánamo: indefinite detention.

On the Senate floor, Obama
<http://obamaspeeches.com/091-Floor-Statement-on-the-Habeas-Corpus-Amendment
-Obama-Speech.htm> passionately intoned in 2006: As a parent, I can also
imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up
in the middle of the night and sent to Guantánamo without even getting one
chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their
innocence. During the 2008 campaign, he
<http://www.salon.com/2009/04/11/bagram_3/> repeatedly denounced the Bush
Administrations attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo.

In the seventh year of Obamas presidency, Guantánamo notoriously remains
open, leaving one of his central vows unfulfilled. That, in turn, means that
Democratic partisans have to scrounge around for excuses to justify this
failure, to cast blame on someone other than the president, lest his legacy
be besmirched. They long ago settled on the claim that blame (as always)
lies not with Obama but with Congressional Republicans, who imposed a series
of legal restrictions that impeded the camps closing.

As Ive  <http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/the_obama_gitmo_myth/> documented
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/obama-guantanamo-hunge
r-strike-moqbel> many times
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/obama-guantanamo-penta
gon-cyber-yemen> over the last several years, that excuse, while true as far
as it goes, does not remotely prove that Obama sought to fulfill his pledge.
Thats because Obamas plans never included an end to what he himself
constantly described as the camps defining evil: indefinite detention. To
the contrary, he  <http://www.salon.com/2009/05/25/obama_105/> explicitly
demanded the right to
<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_int
o_law/> continue to
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/07/AR20110307
04871.html> imprison Guantánamo detainees without charges or trial 
exactly what made Guantánamo so evil in the first place  based on the
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/revealed-the-44-guantanamo
-bay-inmates-too-dangerous-to-release-8664046.html> hideous new phrase
cannot be tried but too dangerous to release. Obama simply wanted to
indefinitely imprison them somewhere else.

In other words, Obama never sought to close Guantánamo in any meaningful
sense but rather wanted to relocate it to a less symbolically upsetting
location, with its defining injustice fully intact and, worse,
institutionalized domestically. In that regard, his Guantánamo shell game
was vintage Obama: He wanted to make a pretty, self-flattering symbolic
gesture to get credit for change (I have closed Guantánamo) while not
merely continuing but actually strengthening the abusive power that made it
so odious in the first place.

All of this is worth emphasizing because the close-Guantánamo controversy is
back in the news as the result of what the Washington Post today, citing
anonymous U.S. officials,
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/guantanamo-closure-p
lan-suffers-setback-over-us-site-for-detainees/2015/08/10/1540c2e0-3f68-11e5
-9561-4b3dc93e3b9a_story.html> describes as an internal disagreement over
its most controversial provision  where to house detainees who will be
brought to the United States for trial or indefinite detention. The Post
said that as part of the plan, the administration had considered sending
some of the 116 detainees remaining at the prison to either a top-security
prison in Illinois or a naval facility in Charleston, S.C. Most members of
Congress who love to parade around as super-tough warriors claim to be
petrified about imprisoning Terrorist super-villains in their states, even
though one of the few things at which the U.S. still excels is building
oppressive penal institutions.

But even Obamas current Guantánamo plan  like all his previous ones  does
not seek to end indefinite detention. It does the opposite: It insists on
the right to continue to indefinitely imprison detainees, most of whom have
already been kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges or trial.
In that regard, Obama  as has been true since the first day of his
presidency  is not seeking to close Guantánamo but rather relocate it, as
Human Rights Watchs Ken Roth
<https://twitter.com/KenRoth/status/631416201315491840> noted today:

The ACLU
<https://www.aclu.org/news/creating-gitmo-north-alarming-step-says-aclu?redi
rect=national-security/creating-gitmo-north-alarming-step-says-aclu> also
made this point from the moment Obama first unveiled his move Guantánamo
plan and Democratic partisans pretended it was a close Guantánamo plan.

Description:
https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/08/aclu.gitmo_1-540x586.png

As the ACLUs Ben Wizner told me in
<http://www.salon.com/2009/05/25/obama_105/> an interview back in 2009,
Obamas Guantánamo plan  long before Congress took any action  was more
likely to strengthen the camps scheme of indefinite detention than end it,
just as Obama did  <http://www.salon.com/2009/05/19/obama_103/> with so many
other once-controversial Bush/Cheney War on Terror policies:

It may to serve to enshrine into law the very departures from the law that
the Bush administration led us on, and that we all criticized so much. And
Ill elaborate on that. But thats really my initial reaction to it; that
what President Obama was talking about yesterday is making permanent some of
the worst features of the Guantanámo regime. He may be shutting down the
prison on that camp, but whats worse is he may be importing some of those
legal principles into our own legal system, where theyll do great harm for
a long time.

Obama-excusing Democrats also love to point out that even Democratic
Senators such as Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders voted for legislation
blocking Obamas Guantánamo plan, implying that even the Senates most
liberal members wanted Gitmo to remain open. But these Obama advocates never
mention that those votes were
<http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/the_obama_gitmo_myth/> based on their
concerns about Obamas desire to simply relocate the camp to U.S. soil and
thus strengthen its core injustice. And all of that is to say nothing of all
the limits on closing Guantánamo,
<http://www.bostonglobe.com/editorials/2013/04/05/obama-congress-should-grap
ple-harder-with-guantanamo/00dJsLI4x8Zj1cR4ntGbCL/story.html> which Obama
himself (not the Republicans)
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/01/07/guantanamo-and-yemen-obama-capi
tulates-to-critics-and-suspends-prisoner-transfers/> imposed.

In sum, its true that Congress impeded Obamas Guantánamo plan. But its
misleading in the extreme to pretend that Obamas plan was ever about ending
the core injustice of that camp. If anything, Obamas plan would have, and
if it succeeds still will, institutionalize and strengthen the Bush/Cheney
scheme of indefinite detention: the very same beyond-the-law framework that
made them want to open the camp, and made it a symbol of injustice around
the world, in the first place.

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