Filibuster Cartoons
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A government guided solely by ideology is a dangerous thing. But an even more dangerous thing may be a government that doles out ideology in random dollops, without any uniting sense of portion, predictability, or consistency.
Though he carries a lot of ideological baggage and certainly has his share of ideologically-inspired interests, President Obama is not an excessively ideological politician — his soft-spined compromises on contentious matters like tax cuts and (soon) the debt ceiling seem to be ample evidence of that. Yet, in an obvious sop to his roots, base, or whatever else, there still remain a couple of issues which the President has arbitrarily elevated to the status of an ideological fetish; matters so sacred to some abstract principle of left-wing purity that no degree of surrender from their defence is permitted — even if every related issue is already compromised beyond recognition.
Guantanamo Bay seems to be one such fetish. Having aggressively campaigned in favor of its closure during the 2008 election, and then, upon his first day in office, signed an executive order demanding it be done, Obama has failed pathetically in all subsequent efforts to actually shut down the joint. As this long and fascinating essay in the Washington Post documents in lurid detail, the Administration’s hated of Gitmo has never really coincided with a viable alternative, in large part because almost all alternatives are equally unpleasant. Yet even as the place’s permanence begins to look more and more unavoidable, the fight against Gitmo continues, under ever-more convoluted and abstract justifications, leading to ever more ad-hoc and strange schemes of imprisonment and prosecution.
To summarize the issue broadly, during the course of the eight-year Bush administration, around 800 overseas combatants were rounded up by US forces and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, an anachronistic territory of Cuba still under US jurisdiction. The men were all said to “enemy combatants” of the War on Terror, which is to say Al-Qaeda terrorists, Taliban fighters, or other, more amorphous “supporters” of their causes or campaigns. The vast majority were released before Obama took office, usually to their home countries, but a core group of around 170 remain in the center to this day.
Originally, the Obama plan was to try these remaining people in US courts, but the plan hit several snags. For starters, the President’s own Justice Department has estimated that less than a quarter of the remaining Gitmo detainees were captured with enough evidence to actually try them with anything, by US legal standards. Yet no other countries seem to want them, and allowing them to immigrate to the United States (which has, in fact, been attempted as a possible solution in some cases) seems far too politically toxic. So for now, they’re simply indefinite wards of the state, who need to be kept somewhere, if not Gitmo, then some other forever-prison elsewhere.
For those detainees with stronger cases against them, the notion of transferring detainees to the US mainland for trial has proven extremely radioactive, with Congress repeatedly passing harsh laws to prevent the idea from moving forward. Though these laws are quite plausibly unconstitutional, the Obama administration has so far not shown much interest in contesting them.
In 2011, pinched by Congress — which largely favors the Gitmo status quo — and the Supreme Court — who has ruled detainees have a right to some kind of trial — Obama relunctantly agreed to resume Bush-era military tribunals at Gitmo, a system of “war courts” that exist outside the formal American judicial regime. Understandably, this was viewed as a major compromise of the President’s first-day promise to close the place down entirely, which has, in turn, led to a ramping up of other anti-Gitmo initiatives elsewhere, in order to assemble some sort of “we’re for it yet against it” salve for the Democrats’ liberal base.
Since the War on Terror is still ongoing, the most practical anti-Gitmo Obama initiative has been to strenuously avoid sending new people to the prison camp. An alleged Somali terrorist who’s been in the news recently was imprisoned for several months on a US navy warship rather than Gitmo, for instance, in a decision that’s been getting a lot of flack from Republicans. Senator Lindsey Graham, who at one time favored closing Gitmo, has characterized the Administration’s new detention approach as “basically making decisions around not having to use Gitmo, rather than what’s best for the country.” To this, one could add that the Obama administration seems more interested in not using Gitmo than not indefinitely detaining people in a rights-free, military-run, legal no-man’s-land, which is very much how a number of civil libertarians, including the ACLU, have characterized the Somali guy’s floating detention center.
Likewise, we can’t say that the Obama administration has ever shown much respect for the legal rights of the dozens of terror suspects it’s killed via drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Indeed, the drone strikes have faced rising human rights criticism for precisely this reason: from the perspective of the government, such attacks may simply represent a darkly easier, preemptive solution to the dilemma of prisoners of war.
Overall, it’s hard to find a common ideological thread running through the Obama approach to the War on Terror. Clearly Gitmo represents something bad, but that something may not be much more than the physical place itself. Any method of getting people out of there — or not in there in the first place — seems to be equally justifiable, be it a civilian trial, military tribunal, indefinite imprisonment somewhere else, or even death on the battlefield. All this just so the President can run for a second term claiming to still be “with” progressives on the evil of Guantanamo Bay, though I doubt progressives will be that easily hoodwinked.
July 7th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
Second comic in a row about robots! Let's all watch Blade Runner, like, right now.
July 7th, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Solution: bomb Gitmo.
July 8th, 2011 at 12:37 am
Put them on trial or let them go. They are terrorists or they aren't. Simple. Pull it like a bandaid. Waiting just creates one problem after another. If it was done at once then only some people would complain but then it would be done. Now everyone is complaining.
July 8th, 2011 at 1:32 am
American judges don't wear powdered wigs!
July 8th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Don't give al Qaeda ideas.
July 8th, 2011 at 8:12 am
They're also not allowed to be anthropomorphic military weaponry.
July 8th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
But if they *were*, they still would not wear powdered wigs.
July 8th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
I propose a federal statue denoting that all federal judges that are not human be forced to wear powdered wigs in all cartoon representations. We'll call it JJ's Retroactive Infallibility Act of 2011.
July 9th, 2011 at 12:37 am
My issue with military tribunals and indefinite prison sentences is that I don't view the issue of terrorism as a war-issue. Al-Qaeda and other groups like it don't operate as a nation does, and thus, it's counter-productive to consider counter-terrorism to be an issue in which we can treat certain people as "enemy combatants". The most successful way of combating terrorism thus-far has been to treat them in much the same way that one would treat gangsters — which makes sense, since their organization bears much resemblance to that of mexican drug cartels (you could even make the case that most terrorist rings ARE ideologically driven drug cartels, since that's one of their main sources of income)
I think our attitude towards the people detained at Gitmo is that we're so debilitatingly afraid of them that we've accepted a course of action in their detainment that wouldn't be considered sane or legal otherwise. In addition, I think that trying these people in military tribunals gives way too much credit to the ones who are guilty, as well as their friends back home. As far as they're concerned, they're soldiers in a holy war. The only thing that trying them on an aircraft carrier, or some offshore military base accomplishes is reenforce the delusions of Islamic radicals.
TL;DR, we'd try gangsters and racketeers in civilian court — why not terrorists? It's not as if someone who kills people for drug money is any less inherently dangerous than someone who kills people for Allah.
July 9th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
The entire debate on whether terrorism is a 'war issue' or a 'crime issue' is based on a narrow view that it must be one or the other. What we all need to understand, from policy makers to the so called 'man on the street' is that terrorism is neither a war or crime issue but its own distinct form of evil. That is part of what makes it so difficult to face.
War is a threat to a nation as a whole while crime is more of a threat to the local populace in which the crime takes place. The problem with comparing terrorism to crime is that terrorism is, like war, a threat to a nation as a whole.
A case in point would be the very Mexican cartels you mentioned. Ten years ago they were entirely viewed in both the United States and Mexico as a law enforcement issue. That is not the case today as the cartels themselves have taken on some of the tactics of terrorist. They have been known to shoot up sporting events, schools, children's birthday parties and other public events. This is not to mention the mass graves, assassinations of public figures and beheadings.
In response to this escalation the Mexican government has now deployed its own military to face off against the cartels because law enforcement simply is not capable. I have a feeling that if 30,000+ Americans had died since 2006 (12,456 in 2010 alone) at the hands of drug cartels (some of those deaths are Americans, but most are Mexicans) we would see American military involvement in Mexico, too.
I could probably write a 5,000 word essay on the subject and not even begin to broach how complicated it is, and I am a laymen. There are other issues such as having to give up intelligence methods in a civilian trial in order to show how evidence was obtain, not to mention the overriding ideals of due process that are strained by simply killing them from afar with drone strikes.
That is why I think we need to get away from the war vs. crime debate and find a new approach. Terrorism simply does not fit into the mold of either. Some serious outside the box thinking is required, but that will have to fall to someone far more intelligent and knowledgeable on the subject than I.
July 10th, 2011 at 12:37 am
Obama's dilemma is almost a lesson in history. The reason we have a POW system is to avoid having to kill the enemy–an act of mercy.
POWs are detained until they'd no longer be a threat on the battlefield or to civilians at large. In the case of al Qaeda and similar groups, this often means a life sentence. This might seem cruel, but the alternative is to either kill them (such as with the drone attacks) or allow them to kill you.
Worth noting that the Geneva Conventions were written intentionally to exempt guerrilla and terrorists from it's protections (Art 4 Sec 2 of the 1949 Convention concerning POWs), which is why Bush was justified in refusing to call them POWs, and why Obama is legally justified to just blow their brains out.
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