Dan

Calabrese

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May 7, 2009

So, Closing Guantanamo’s Not Such a Good Idea After All

It’s actually somewhat encouraging that President Obama can recognize reality when it smacks him in the face, and that he can shift directions accordingly – as he is now doing on the matter of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison and the associated military tribunals.

It’s also freaking hilarious. So let us give the president credit for not pursuing this particular recklessly irresponsible path, even as we laugh ourselves silly at him for ever having promised to change the highly effective policies the Bush Administration had put in place.

Obama campaigned on the notion that Guantanamo was little more than a torture chamber where sadistic Americans lived out their sick fantasies at the expense of poor, innocent Middle Eastern gentlemen who had been just standing around bothering no one when blood-thirsty U.S. troops pointed rifles at their heads and ordered them onto the U.S.S. Dick Cheney for a little ride.

Poor souls.

Even worse, he bemoaned that the evil military commissions supposedly denied these fine gentlemen the due process to which they were not even entitled as non-U.S. citizens and enemy combatants.

So once he became president, one of Obama’s first actions was to sign an executive order directing that Guantanamo be closed within a year and that the detainees be moved elsewhere. Where? Oh, they’d figure that out soon enough, and they surely wouldn’t subject them to judgment at the hands of the evil military commissions.

It’s a funny thing – reality. When you’re running for president, those guys at Guantanamo can be pretty much anything you want them to be. And if you want them to be poor innocent victims of the sinister Bush Administration, hey, put it in the speech! The crowds will love it and the media won’t question you.

But when you become president, a couple things happen under the category of reality slapping you in the face. First, all that classified information that tells you what the dudes really did, and why they’re really there? Yeah, they give those to you now. So you start putting two and two together and figuring out what will happen if you release the kind souls – especially if you bring them onto U.S. soil, have them tried in federal court by prosecutors who can’t use classified information as evidence, and then release them onto the streets of Topeka, Kansas.

And once you have realized all this, you say to yourself, “Oh $#(*@!” And you announce that the “study” you are conducting to figure out what to do will take a little longer than you first thought. Then you try to figure out how to go back to doing exactly what Bush was doing – because it’s the only responsible thing you could possibly do – but make it look like you changed it enough so that it’s really different.

How does one explain such a disparity between what candidate Obama said and what President Obama is going to do? Why, you laud his open-mindedness and adaptability! Here is how Paul Rothstein, a Georgetown law professor, put it:

"Once you become president and see the whole panoply of issues that you face, some of the things that seemed easy to promise or talk about during the campaign sometimes appear more difficult. Elections are fought on big slogans without much nuance or detail. I think we want a president who responds to what he sees when he actually gets in there and sees the whole picture, rather than one who adheres rigidly to what he said before."

Translation: It’s a good thing he isn’t keeping the promises he made during the campaign, because he obviously didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about – as I seem to recall one or two of us may have suspected at the time.

As for the fate of Guantanamo itself, well, Obama did order it closed within a year. Then again, Obama’s been known to “delay” the implementation of decisions once he realizes how dumb they were. Will Guantanamo ever really close? We’ll see. In the meantime, at least we know our president won’t see a decision through, come hell or high water, once it becomes obvious it’s a disaster.

That is not much, but given the caliber of the people we’re dealing with here, at least it’s something.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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