Guantanamo Redux

President Obama, who directed that Guantanamo be closed on the second day of his first term, has once again vowed to close the notorious prison.  He is shamefully late. Nor is he blameless.  While  Congress -- with both parties in rare agreement -- has shackled him with legislative road blocks,  the law does give him a discretionary waiver to order transfers to willing countries' He has chosen not to use it.

Guantanamo is an abject failure  Only 166 remain of the total of 779 who have been detained  there.  Military tribunals, a dubious source of fair trials, have managed to convict only seven.  Later in the proceedings three more have been convicted and only six of the remaining population may face trial. As the President recently observed, the federal courts' track record is much better.

The remaining prisoners range from Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged master mind behind 9/11 who isn't going anywhere, to Shaker Aamet, a British resident captured in 2001 by a War Lord, and allegedly handed to the American forces in return for the bounty on offer.  According to The Economist, a respected British publication, Aamet could be repatriated to Great Britain which is well able to monitor him.  Some 86 of the residual prisoners were in 2010 vetted for transfer because, like Aamet, they claim their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and evidence was lacking to refute them. All are still there.

Small wonder that 100 (the prison's count) to 130 (defense lawyers tally) of the inmates are on a hunger strike, including Aamet.  They are being force fed through a tube snaked through a nostril and down the throat through the esophagus and into the stomach.  This procedure is difficult enough with willing sedated patients, and a bloody nightmare when the victim resists.  Of course prisoners must be tied down once the tube is in place, or they may drag it back out. 

Many Americans who are unable to eat normally for various reasons also use a feeding tube for nourishment.  However their doctors surgically prepare an opening to the stomach  in which the tube can be easily inserted.  My father had a feeding tube so placed shortly before he died.  Dinner of fortified liquids was bereft of taste and aroma, but also without discomfort.

So Guantanamo remains open for business, although nobody has arrived or departed in a year.  The Economist reports that only one part of the base has been shuttered.  It is the diplomatic office that found  countries willing to take those that the military quietly released  in the early days , thereby tacitly acknowledging that their dragnet had swept up many a bewildered bystander.

Why Guantanamo? Specifically, why is it still open?  History reveals that when the American people are sufficiently shocked and scared by bombings and other attacks, they compromise their freedoms and sully their heritage to buy a little safety The attack on  9/11 was such a time.  The Patriot Act is only the latest  to breech the Constitution.  Equally notorious was the executive order President Roosevelt was persuaded to sign so a bigoted army general could relocate Japanese-American citizens from California to inland concentration camps after Pear Harbor.  Collectively we lost our nerve.  Even the Supreme Court went along with this puerile program.  After World War I the Justice Department went on a witch hunt for socialist subversives.  The McCarthy era fought the Cold War by refining that process with dubious lists of communists, bycharacter assassinations and qirh demeaning loyalty oaths.

What's to be done?  Of course close the prison.  Barack Obama needs to show some spine and repatriate the residue except for the really bad guys. He needs to play the part of Commander-in-Chief and bring the military to heel.  He needs to order the State Department to get back on the job and explain to countries unwilling to take back their wayward citizens that there will be consequences if they don't.. Finally we, too, need reminding that liberties dearly bought are worth risking our lives to keep and honor, even if those who hate and threaten us are bearded smelly towel heads prone to careful plots and sudden sneaky violence.

Remember the President's explicit Constitutional responsibility to see that the laws be safely executed?  Perpetual detention in our system is lawful only for the violently insane.  Congress can rant and rave and even sue.  But I'll bet that the Supreme Court remembers habis corpus among other parts of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Some will say that foreigners are not to be accorded our rights and privileges.  They have a narrow point, especially since "enemy combatant" has become the accepted term of art to categorize Guantanamo's inhabitants.  But prisoners of war get to go home when the war is over, and our two wars are thankfully winding down.  And a  foreign national convicted of crimes under our laws while on our land, is given an explicit sentence after his day in court.  Perpetual detention without telling the detainee why is straight out of Kafka.  That is no place from which to retrieve an American
way of justice.