“I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Gitmo.”
President-elect Barack Obama on ABC “This Week,” January 11,2009.
What a difference two years as president makes.
When President Obama issued his January 2009 executive order closing the Guantánamo detention center as “consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice,” anyone predicting it would still be open and thriving two years later would have been denounced as crazy. Yet this is precisely what has happened—and it is part of a larger picture. What President Obama seems to have learned between then and today is that George W. Bush’s war on terror was indeed consistent with America’s national security interests. So was keeping and interrogating prisoners at Gitmo.
Far from pulling us out of Iraq as presidential candidate Barack Obama promised, he has steadfastly kept us in. Far from scaling down the war in Afghanistan, he has ramped it up. It’s all been hedged with solemn pledges about deadlines for bringing American troops home—just like the pledge about closing Gitmo.
The same thing has happened with wireless wiretaps. Senator Barack Obama fiercely denounced them. Now they’re officially part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s anti-terrorist arsenal. When Bush inaugurated Predator drone strikes, human rights groups were furious. Now their favorite presidential candidate has made these strikes to an almost weekly event in Pakistan and Yemen. He’s also revived CIA covert operations, including mobilizing several thousand Afghan paramilitaries who conduct regular raids across the border into Pakistan—the biggest covert action program since the bad old days of Vietnam.
Some on the left might be excused for wondering whether Bush really left office, after all. That worries and depresses them. The rest of us breathe a sigh of relief.
Now we are waiting for President Obama to take the next step. This would be a public apology to former President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who saw that setting up the Guantánamo detention center was vital to America’s future security; and to the team at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, including John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who made it clear that such a step was in keeping with U.S. principles of justice and the powers of commander-in-chief—and who, despite being cleared of any and all charges, continue to be denounced as war criminals.
And finally a vote of thanks to the American men and women who have served their country at Gitmo for almost ten thankless years: who have endured daily danger and humiliation from the inmates they supervise, subterfuge by the inmates’s lawyers and international groups, and who were attacked as vicious mindless torturers on the floor of the Senate.
Events have vindicated their cause, and history will remember their service. It’s time this administration did, too.
What a difference a month makes.