Prisons here or prisons elsewhere?

Posted: Monday, May 25, 2009 8:01 pm
By: Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift

By DOUGLAS COHN
and ELEANOR CLIFT
WASHINGTON — President Obama finally succeeded in bringing Senate Democrats and Republicans together in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, but without the outcome that he wanted.
Democrats joined Republicans for a 90 to 6 vote denying the administration the funds it requested to close the prison at Guantanamo and blocking the transfer of any detainees to high-security facilities in the United States.
The backlash had been building for some time against Obama’s Inaugural Week declaration that he would shut down Guantanamo in one year. The administration failed to develop a convincing plan for how to handle the 240 detainees still housed there. Foreign governments are reluctant to accept them and the suggestion that they might be held in American prisons to await trial sparked a classic NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) outbreak on Capitol Hill.
Polls show that Americans when asked if they would accept a terrorist in their neighborhood not surprisingly said no.
There are few profiles in courage on Capitol Hill. Even a stalwart like Virginia’s Jim Webb reversed himself from his earlier support for Obama, opposing bringing any of the detainees to the United States, including several Uyghurs, Muslims from China, whom a federal judge has ruled are not terrorists and should be released. There has been talk of re-locating them in Virginia.
Webb is taking the position that until the detainees have been tried and their cases adjudicated, Guantanamo should remain open. He says he changed his position after familiarizing himself with the high-security, high-tech facilities at Guantanamo and concluding they would be hard to duplicate elsewhere. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money building the facility, he thinks that abandoning it now doesn’t make sense.
Webb has a point about keeping Guantanamo open. The prison became a symbol of shame because of the abuses that went on there in America’s name. Now that the Obama administration has declared an end to those abuses, closing Guantanamo loses the urgency it once had when Obama and his opponent for the presidency, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., were both pledging on the campaign trail to shut it down if elected.
Testimony provided by FBI Director Robert Mueller sealed the case for Democrats worried about being seen as soft on terrorists. Mueller said that bringing the detainees into U.S. maximum security prisons would give them an opportunity to proselytize and win converts for their cause, posing additional challenges for the FBI in domestic surveillance. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Colo., who is up for reelection next year, led the Democrats in rebuffing Obama. The prospect of being on the wrong side of public opinion when it comes to the treatment of terrorists produced the lopsided 90-6 vote slapping down one of Obama’s highest-profile campaign promises.
Assuming that the detainees at Guantanamo can’t be held indefinitely without some recourse to justice and some resolution of their cases, Americans should be asked whether they would rather have the baddest of the bad held in a maximum security U.S. prison or in a comparable facility overseas.
Which would be easier to escape from? Bearing in mind that drug gang members recently dressed up as police officers and raided a prison in Mexico, freeing their buddies, America’s track record when it comes to holding a domestic terrorist like Timothy McVeigh, or an international criminal like Panama’s Manuel Noriega, along with countless serial killers, is unimpeachable.
Lawmakers have a legitimate complaint that the administration has not sufficiently explained how it will handle the variety of people held at Guantanamo, some for longer than seven years. But saying U.S. prisons can’t safely house them is fear-mongering, and it’s too bad the Democrats took the low road along with the Republicans.
Published in The Messenger 5.25.09