guantanamobama

Something tells me they don't get the irony.

So Barack Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo Bay. (The detention camp; the military base on Cuban soil will of course remain.) He said it a bunch of times on the campaign trail. But now that he's got the power to actually do it, turns out it's "more difficult than a lot of people realize."

The question, of course, is what to do with the approximately 250 prisoners currently under indefinite, legally murky detention there. The quandary Obama faces was quite interestingly debated by five legal experts in a recent New York Times blog post.

If Guantanamo is indeed shuttered, Obama has a few options on what to do with the detainees:

1. Agree to either release them or try them in US courts.
2. Ship them off to one of those secret CIA prisons we've heard about.
3. Ship them off to another country, where they could (a) continue to be interrogated by the CIA/military intelligence/other US shadow-people; (b) be tortured by the locals, possibly but not necessarily in combination with (a); (c) be released by sympathetic forces, or (d) all of the above.
4. Create some new legal justification for continuing to hold them indefinitely without due process under the guise of "administrative detention."

Almost everyone agrees that option #1 is extremely unlikely. Let's just assume for a moment that at least some of the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay are hardened terrorists genuinely dangerous to the US. (Of course, we don't really know that, but let's say so for the purposes of argument.) As several of these legal experts point out, many of these people could never be convicted of any crime under the US justice system, since any "evidence" of their hardened terrorist nature would be unusable because (a) public knowledge of its source would compromise ongoing US intelligence operations, (b) it was obtained under torture, or (c) it doesn't exist.

Options #2 and #3 are really the same option--various ways of sweeping under the rug the continued detention of a large number of people without trial. This would be somewhat like when the US military closed the infamous School of the Americas--only to immediately re-open it in the same location under a new name. "New name, same shame," we said then.

Option #4--which, frighteningly enough, a number of the legal scholars on the NYT blog advocate--is perhaps the most novel and scariest. This is to create some new legal category of "administrative detention," which would allow the US to legally hold so-called enemy combatants at will until the end of the conflict in which they were involved. Right away, this brings up two questions:

1. If we're supposedly engaged in an endless war on terror, when the hell is the end of the conflict? And who decides?
2. AAAAAHHH!

The little paranoid radical inside of me is screaming at this idea...since it sound very much like the kind of thing that could be quite easily used against all kinds of people, including American citizens in a period of civil unrest. It sounds like, oh, I don't know, "institutionali[zing] detention-without-trial," as Matthew Waxman says on the blog.

Indefinite detention without trial, charges, access to legal council or even the minimal humanitarian standards afforded to recognized POWs is not terribly common in democracies. It's much more frequently associated with police states, dictatorships, military juntas, etc. In Latin America it's even got its own euphemism--"disappeared."

Obama appears to have rejected this course of action, at least for now. This leaves some solution of the "new name/same shame" variety as the most likely option, in my opinion. Let us not forget that it was Bill Clinton who created the neat-o trick of extraordinary rendition in the '90s. This leaves me with the conclusion that Obama's promises to close Guantanamo will result in neither (a) a victory for human rights, (b) a measurable improvement in conditions for the remaining detainees, nor (c) a weak concession to the millions of people the world over who, quite rightly, hate the US government's guts. No, I'm pretty sure it will be (d) none of the above.