Gitmo gains new perspective

William McGurn:

A funny thing happened on the road to Barack Obama's inaugural: America became open to rational debate on Guantanamo.

Not all that long ago, Guantanamo was simply one more manifestation of the wickedness of George W. Bush. Back then, the operating assumption appeared to be that the only people being held at Guantanamo were innocent goat herders whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the focus was on detainee abuse and their lack of rights, as witness an Associated Press headline from last December: "Lawyers complain iguanas at Guantanamo get more legal protection than detainees."

One year later, we now have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters at Gitmo saying they want to plead guilty. And the headlines have begun to concede that closing the detention center will not be as easy as the critics suggested. "Closing detainee camp a minefield of critical steps," notes the Miami Herald. "Closing it may be the easy part; With Guantanamo, the issue for Obama will be deciding what to do with the 250 prisoners, experts say" reports the L.A. Times. "Close Guantanamo prison? Sure. But that's the easy part," says USA Today.

What unites all these stories is the acknowledgment of the basic fact of Guantanamo: The problem is the people, not the place.

As evidence of this new openness, the New York Times recently ran a piece reporting that "even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted."

Exactly. The real issue isn't even so much the idea of trying these men in federal courts, which has already been done with Zacarias Moussaoui. The real issues for the president-elect are as follows: Where in America would you put these men? Would you release them on American soil if they are found not guilty? What about those whose home countries will not take them back? And what do you do with the toughest cases: those for whom the evidence is insufficient for a trial, but sufficient to tell us they are far too dangerous to release?

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There was always a lot of dishonesty on the Democrat side of this argument. If the same place and rules had been set up by a Democrat administration the decibel level on the issue would have dropped by 90 percent.

One of the biggest problems with the Democrat position is they want to impose lawfare principals on a warfare issue. It was their lawfare approach to dealing with bin Laden that led to 9-11, and many of them, including Obama want to returned to those failed policies. the Bush administration has too often lent credence to that argument by pushing for trials.

We should start with the premise that these unlawful combatants can and should be held unil the end of the conflict or we find some other valid reason to release them. But they do not have a right to a trial or to release until the war is over.

Some of them such as KSM and those directly responsible for 9-11 can and should be tried for their war crimes, but that is a separate issue from their detention at Gitmo. I really don't care what liberals around the world think about Gitmo, but some in the Democrat party would like to close the place as a PR move to get the "love" of some who will hate us anyway.