The left's Gitmo myths

Arthur Herman:

...

If one adds to this mix:
• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that found no evidence of those abuses taking place;
• the revelation during the release earlier this year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques had been applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight years and had never been standard operating practice at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans;
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate force” should be used “against those nations, organizations, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September 11;
—one may be permitted to wonder why, exactly, the pressure to close the prison facility has been so intense and long-lasting.

The standard argument is that the public shift in attitude toward Gitmo was gradual, and reflected a growing disillusionment with the war on terror as the sordid details of how George W. Bush and his assistants chose to wage it came out, including the supposed secret use of torture. Once the detention center had become a cesspool of human-rights abuse, the evil spawned there then seeped into other facilities where prisoners in the Bush war on terror were being held, most notoriously the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib. In 2004, former Vice President Al Gore announced that Abu Ghraib “was not the result of random acts by a ‘few bad apples’: it was the natural consequence of the Bush administration policy” of retaining and interrogating inmates at Gitmo.

What this account and others like it fail to take into consideration are the aggressive and unending efforts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Democrats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These efforts began even before it was opened, in November 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.”

The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave violence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility, have aided in the release of prisoners who have since committed acts of terrorism outside the United States, and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s government release young men with terrifying ambitions for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the United States.

...

The tale would later be told that many of these prisoners were hapless shepherds, farmers, and even tourists caught up in the fighting, and that the Northern Alliance, the Afghan guerrilla group with which the United States was allied in the fight against the Taliban, was handing over innocent men whom they falsely dubbed al-Qaeda members in order to collect a money bounty.

In point of fact, the military captured more than 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous screening process. Ten thousand were released immediately. By the time the military had completed its work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists who could not be released without running the risk they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to do with them.

From the beginning, the Department of Defense and its head, Donald Rumsfeld, were deeply reluctant to take on the job of detaining these prisoners who, unlike normal POWs, fought for no country, wore no uniforms, and had systematically broken the rules of war. In a conventional war, prisoners are held to keep them from being returned to the fight. The problem here was that there was no conventional battlefield; in a war of terror, a combatant can theoretically strike anywhere in the world. It was not clear to anyone what was to be done with this new model of stateless combatant. Rumsfeld “hated the idea of being a jailer,” as his aide Douglas Feith relates in his memoir, War and Decision, in large measure owing to the fact that they were not automatically covered under the Geneva Convention. Deciding how they were to treated or tried posed immense legal difficulties that no lawyer at the Department of Defense was eager to take on.

...

Gitmo was never meant to be a prison where inmates were to serve sentences for crimes. It was, in the words of a Defense Department document, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “enemy combatants from continuing the fight against the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, the conditions under which these unconventional prisoners were to be held did involve questions.

...

There is much more in this long article, but the last quoted paragraph points to a central fact that Obama and much of the left blithely ignore. They do so because they are stuck in the lawfare mode rather than the warfare mode. They are worried about due process for enemy combatants. But indefinite detention has always been the rule for captives in war and is consistent with the laws of war. When the al Qaeda useful idiots at the ACLU and elsewhere argue about the lack of charges against these terrorist they are arguing in the context of lawfare where we put the enemy on trial. That is both impractical and unnecessary.