To the list of unilateral second-term moves, we can now add President Obama’s determination to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in the face of both public opinion and congressional intent. The New York Times reports that the administration has accelerated the release of terrorists detained at Gitmo: “Now 127 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, down from 680 in 2003, and the Pentagon is ready to release two more groups of prisoners in the next two weeks; officials will not provide a specific number. President Obama’s goal in the last two years of his presidency is to deplete the Guantánamo prison to the point where it houses 60 to 80 people and keeping it open no longer makes economic sense.” Obama appears hell-bent on emptying Gitmo before he leaves office, to fulfill a campaign pledge from 2008, no matter the consequences.
This is in spite of the fact that 66 percent of Americans oppose closing the detention facility and even though the Senate voted 90-6 in 2009 not to provide the funds necessary to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to stateside prisons. Obama still can’t bring the detainees to the American mainland so he is shipping them home–even if home is a chaotic place like Yemen where these terrorists are likely to reenter the fight. The Times writes, chillingly: “In one example of the administration’s eagerness to speed the releases, the White House is no longer waiting for security improvements in Yemen before transferring Yemeni prisoners.”
This cavalier attitude raises the risks of recidivism, which were already high to begin with. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence notes that, as of July 15, 2014, 29.7 percent of former Gitmo detainees are confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities. There are reports that some 20 to 30 former Gitmo detainees have joined ISIS or other radical groups in Syria and that another former Gitmo detainee was behind the attack which killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
We are virtually assured of more such terrorists on the loose if Obama continues with his plan to close Gitmo without having any plan in place to keep the detainees locked up. It is the height of irresponsibility to continue releasing detainees without any idea of what they will do next. Congress needs to step in to pass legislation making sure that suitable safeguards are in place before any further detainee releases occur.
Alas, Congress cannot force Obama to send newly captured terrorist suspects to Gitmo–which means that there is effectively no way to process them unless there is near-certainty that they can be convicted in a federal criminal court. This means that U.S. forces, both military and CIA, operating oversees have a de facto preference for killing terrorist suspects rather than imprisoning them–especially now that the U.S. no longer has the right to run its own detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is of a piece with the marked increase in drone strikes under the Obama presidency, which is certainly a defensible policy but not if it comes at the expense of capturing and interrogating terrorists who can provide valuable information. It’s hard to see why it’s considered humane to blow up a terrorist suspect with a Hellfire missile (and in all likelihood a number of innocent civilians who happen to be in his vicinity) but inhumane to hold that same suspect in Gitmo where conditions are far better than in any maximum-security prison used for normal convicts.
One can only conclude that Obama’s ideological and political animus against Gitmo–opened, of course, by the preceding president whom he loathes–is producing dangerous and nonsensical national security decisions.
