President Obama began his term, playing the great liberator, with his hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, and an executive order symbolically freeing the slaves—or more precisely, an instruction to close the “plantation” at Guantanamo Bay that houses select Islamist terrorists from around the world. The world’s “liberals” have roared their approval.
Let me retrospectively insert the word “alleged” in my penultimate sentence as, in principle, some inmates may have been captured by mistake, and in practice military tribunals were proceeding, in which guilt had yet to be formally established. Such trials have been suspended for 120 days, to further liberal cheering. They are extremely sensitive about the rights of (“alleged”) psychopathic killers, captured in flagrante delicto on foreign battlefields, though relatively indifferent to the fate of their victims.
For the victim of a terrorist is dead, or at least severely maimed, and does not need to be put on trial.
Guantanamo was selected, by the Bush administration, to intern terrorists, because no better solution could be found. The military commissions were created, ditto. Under actual international and American law, the inmates have no certain rights whatever: they were not proper soldiers, and therefore not legitimate prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. They may thank their stars they were not shot upon capture. The worst they could face under established interrogation procedures was “waterboarding,” which is not nice, but hardly rises to the condition of real torture.
I know the preceding remark will offend many delicate souls, but that is not the only reason I made it. As people understood, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, and as they still understand in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are dealing with monstrous enemies—with people who not only kill our allied soldiers, but kill defenceless non-combatants gratuitously; who employ terror, to impose tyranny. The insistence on fine points of juridical etiquette in the heat of battle would be insane. But insisting on it later in the calm of a prison camp betrays only a failure of perspective.
It is right of the law to prohibit torture. It is right in almost every circumstance to obey the law (and accept the consequences in any other). There will, however, always be tight corners where “the law
is a ass,” and to pretend this were never the case is to assume a disingenuous posture. Moreover, as when Guantanamo opened, there are circumstances in which no existing law has been written or can be applied, and yet the principle of retribution remains: that the innocent will be vindicated, that the guilty will be punished.
And: that the defenceless will be protected against serial killers. To set any of the Guantanamo inmates free, on some jurisprudential technicality, is to smear one’s hands with the blood of their victims when they return to their trade. This is not a hypothetical proposition: for while the numbers are disputed, a proportion of “low risk” inmates already freed from Guantanamo have returned to action.
This is why families of 9/11 victims were outraged by the executive orders. It is why Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who lost 17 of his men in the attack on the USS Cole (at Aden in 2000), said of the order, “It
demeans their deaths.” For among the apparent beneficiaries of President Obama’s “symbolic” measure is a “suspect” in the Cole attack.
It is why American and allied soldiers, whose lives are on the line against Islamist terrorists not yet captured, must necessarily feel demoralized. Conversely, it gives them a powerful motive to overlook the niceties when another of the enemy falls into their hands.
Barack Obama is not a complete fool, and the measures he has ordered are likely to prove cosmetic. Paradoxically, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo may well now suffer worse fates than if they had remained on location
untried, or been processed through the military tribunals. For they will have to be sent somewhere. No country, whose citizenship they may nominally carry, is eager to receive them. Dump them on the authorities in, say, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, and I daresay their prison conditions will not improve.
The liberal mind—now fully restored to power in the United States—is in love with symbolic gestures. It is not much enamoured of the hard prudential reasoning that is involved in choosing between two or more evils. The mystery, to me, is the consistency with which it chooses to ignore the greater evil, in order to address the lesser.
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