Gitmo: Dilemma For Obama

Presidential candidates routinely make promises that they cannot keep. Sometime in the afternoon of January 20 they are given the first of a series of briefings that will explain to them why some of their pet campaign promises are politically, militarily, economically or logistically impossible.
Oh, well … .
A classic example was the “missile gap” of 1960. Kennedy got tons of press throughout that campaign by harping on the “fact” that the Soviets had far more missiles than we—and that if we wanted to survive we had to build lots more.
All the while, President Eisenhower was sitting on top secret intelligence reports that showed, if anything, the US was ahead of the Russians. There was no missile gap. But Eisenhower—and his Vice President, Richard Nixon—could not reveal this data for national security reasons.
(If the Russians knew what we knew, then they could figure out where the leak was—and compromise our intelligence gathering capabilities. So Ike couldn’t speak. We had the same problem with the German enigma code building machine in World War II.
We had it. Using it we could figure out what the Germans were likely to do before they did. But we dared not react too obviously to German plans. If we had, they would have gone to some other system and we would no longer have an inside track. For us, it was a two edged sword. We often had to sit still and let them go ahead and hit us.)
Ike kept his mouth shut and Nixon went down to a very narrow defeat. The real facts about the missile situation might have altered the election results.
This year President Obama has a campaign promise problem on HIS hands. He made a high sounding election promise he is having an absolutely miserable time trying to keep. No, I’m not talking about health care. Presidents have been bombing on that promise for decades. I’m talking Gitmo.
He and his fellow Democrats happily took up the international cry that the Guantanamo prison for terrorist suspects was a dreadful place, a dreadful idea. It was just mean to keep these poor terrorists locked up on a Caribbean Island.
People often have as much memory as chickens do. Somebody once observed a snake as it entered a chicken coop. Great squawkings and flappings. The snake lay very still. Eventually the chickens forgot all about him. Some even roosted on his back. Dinner.
I am convinced that, if instead of hanging Heinrich Himmler within a year of the war’s end, we had detained him for several years, there would have eventually been a hue and cry over our inhumane treatment of the poor Gestapo/Death Camp commander.
Like forgetful chickens, the liberal Democracy forgot about the snake (you remember, the one who made a big hole in the bottom of Manhattan), and started calling for an end to imprisonment, especially for those who had been caught before they could actually kill Americans.
Especially they called for an end to detainment at Guantanamo. They joined those in the international community who had 1) been alienated by George Bush and 2) who can hardly wait for us to get out of Iraq so they can start signing oil contracts. For them, Guantanamo and its jump-suit clad detainees became a convenient target.
Just because Bush had the knack of irritating a lot of people and went about a lot of things the wrong way doesn’t mean he was wrong on everything. I believe he got Guantanamo right. It’s on a military base surrounded by troops as well as guards. It’s far from American citizens who get nervous at the thought of a few hundred terrorists next door. It’s in the middle of a large body of water—a whale of a swim for any escapees.
I suspect that by now Obama is—like Kennedy before him—secretly beginning to think his predecessor got this one right, too. Oh my, the political stink that rises when someone suggests moving the detainees to this state or that.
Congress won’t even give him the money to move them and close Gitmo’s detention camp down by next January. (January, 2010, the month candidate Obama vowed the whole prison would go away.) Now he’s looking at more options for where to put the inmates.
One little problem is that those we are willing to release can’t find a good home. No other nation will take them—not even the ones they were born in. We’re rather in the position of a man who has pulled the pin on a grenade, has no place to throw it, and now must keep squeezing the trigger mechanism so that it doesn’t go off in his hand. Guantanamo is a good place for that.
Suggestions for stateside holding pens (as one commentator put it, places to build a “new Guantanamo”, include a state prison that’s closing down in Michigan and the federal military prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
(I’ll throw in a refurbished Alcatraz—it, too, is a long swim for anybody. Nobody but a fictional character played by Sean Connery in the movie “The Rock” is ever thought to have escaped it. We put Al Capone there; why not a few terrorists?)
It’s all going to cost money. It’s going to create a political flap that most members of Congress do not want to face.
Let’s go over this again. What, exactly, was wrong with Guantanamo? Whose Congressional District is it in? How much less would it cost than to build a duplicate somewhere else—and then transport everybody?
They’re talking about having to transport judges and juries to places like Leavenworth—why not Cuba?
Again, what exactly was wrong with Guantanamo?