Barack And Beeb
Here's President Obama on the BBC:
Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion -- those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity.
Great, so all can enjoy these basics of Western society. I couldn't agree more. Now how to help them do it.
And that's why closing Guantanamo, from my perspective, as difficult as it is, is important.
Closing Guantanamo is a popular idea with many (including our enemies), and may even be a good idea in general, but I think any connection it has with promoting democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech or freedom of religion is exceedingly weak.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:12 AM
4 Comments:
So throwing a bunch of people into a prison purposely put beyond the rule of law, with no plan on how to deal with them except some platitude about how we have held prisoners of war for the duration of conventional wars in the past has nothing to do with democratic values.
While you can make arguments about the specific analogies or the wisdom of this "plan," I just don't see how you can say it has nothing to do with democratic values or the rule of law. One of the most basic issues leading to democracy was the determination that the government should not be able to incarcerate people indefinitely without process.
Whatever its temporary military necessity, "Guantanamo" stood for exceptions to democratic principles for Third World-types.
These are the responses I feared I'd get. Whether or not you agree with the whole concept of Guantanamo, the idea that closing it will impress our enemies so much that they'll adopt the rule of law (rather than be impressed at the cost of fighting us by keeping it open) amounts to pie in the sky.
We're not talking about rule of law within the U.S., but rather the values of America as a nation to inspire others (which, once again, is very tenuous as a path to making others now enslaved free, especially compared to actually taking down dictators). But even on this level, Obama's argument is not impressive. We picked up prisoners and had to put them somewhere. We put them in Guantanamo and treated them better than we've treated a lot of POWs (though they were not normal POWs who respected any rules of war) in previous wars (and incomparably better than how American POWs have been treated by the countries we want to change--if they would just adopt our Guantanamo rules that would be considerable progress). The President had the power to do these things, in the main--and Obama still believes the President has the power to do these things, and has adopted most of Bush's policies in this area. And when Bush was challenged in court (as every President is) by novel legal argument for how he dealt with novel problems, sometimes he won, sometimes he lost (usually in close cases). When he lost, he changed how things were run--that's what's known as rule of law, my friend. (It's not what's necessarily known as democracy, since what Bush did was popular.) He also respected freedom of speech over the issue, and certainly respected freedom of religion for the prisoners, though there were many lies about this.
So Guantanamo today is a legally run prison camp. No reason to shut it down (while operating a similar place in Bagram) except for cheap symbolism, which I would expect those other countries run by our enemies can only laugh at, knowing now that if they fight the U.S., eventually the U.S. President will apologize to them.
For decades, our enemies could look at a free America. What did that lead to? 9/11. Inspiration can only go so far.
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