MAX BOOT: A POSITIONING STATEMENT-NOT POLICY
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/terrorism/positioning-statement-not-policy/
In November 2014, Congress voted to ban the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States. It was not a close vote. The final margin was 91 to 3 in the Senate and 370 to 58 in the House. Those are bipartisan, veto-proof majorities. And since those votes happened, Republicans have gained control of the Senate and increased their House majority.
Yet today President Obama unveiled a plan that directly contradicts the law. He wants to release 35 detainees and move the other 56 to a prison that would be built somewhere in the United States to house them.
In making his case, President Obama repeated the same tired talking points about how Gitmo has been a terrorist recruiting tool, even though there is scant evidence to support this proposition. Even two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady, dispute Obama’s contention. They write:
**Indeed, other issues and grievances seemingly receive much more airtime and emphasis than the detention camp does; and Guantanamo, when mentioned, is often lumped in with other controversial facilities—like Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Detention and abuse of suspected terrorists by the United States, in other words, is a readily discernable motif. But the contemporary propaganda narrative seems to treat that motif as but one category of offenses in a long chain of western transgressions against the Muslim world.
Accordingly, it is hardly clear that Guantanamo’s closure would matter much, so far as concerns the contents of jihadist propaganda. U.S. detention operations at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, after all, are now in the past—but that hasn’t persuaded jihadis to drop their invocations of both prisons in their online literature.**
Poplin and Brady note that Gitmo is especially unimportant in the ISIS narrative. What has really been a terrorist recruiting tool has been the administration’s weakness in the face of the Islamic State. But rather than announce a serious plan to destroy ISIS, Obama finds it much easier to score rhetorical points by announcing a plan to close Gitmo.
His timing is especially bad because, as I argued in the Washington Post, the U.S. needs a detention facility to hold captured ISIS leaders, assuming that we actually capture and interrogate some (as we should). If not Gitmo, then where?
It’s hard to even know what Obama is trying to achieve since there is no chance of a Republican-controlled Congress endorsing his move which is not even supported by most Democrats. Perhaps Obama will try to close Gitmo by executive order but unless he simply plans to release some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. But Speaker Paul Ryan is ready to challenge him in the courts, and I would bet that the congressional Republicans would prevail. It is likely that the courts would bar Obama from transferring the detainees to the United States mainland.
Obama’s “plan” can best be understood, then, as a rhetorical bone that he is tossing to his most die-hard supporters, the ones who are now backing Bernie Sanders because they think Obama has been too right-wing. It is a shame that his presidency has been characterized by all so many of these feckless gestures even as the real threats that America faces have been growing.
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