We will be discussing Guantanamo Bay’s prison facility this week. We will be discussing it because more than 700 highly classified documents pertaining to the detainees housed there have been leaked to the press. The New York Times makes an accurate assessment:
The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.
The documents confirm that the Bush administration created an unholy mess when they set up this prison as an extralegal detention facility and then proceeded to populate it with a hodge-podge of the innocent and the dangerous alike. The documents confirm the mistreatment of prisoners, in violation of international law. But they also highlight the dangers of letting people sworn to do us harm go free to plot against us again.
Depending on what you want to focus on, you can use these documents to bolster diametrically opposed arguments. In other words, they probably won’t nudge us an inch closer to consensus on how to deal with the mess that Bush left us.
The starting point for discussing this should be the May 20, 2009 vote on Sen. Daniel Inouye’s amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act. That amendment forbade “funding to transfer, release, or incarcerate detainees detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States.” It passed in the U.S. Senate by a 90-6 tally, with noted liberals like Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Barbara Boxer of California, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio all voting in the affirmative. This was followed up in December 2010 by another vote in the Senate.
One of its provisions bans using its funds to transfer into the United States any Guantánamo detainee this fiscal year — even for the purpose of prosecution.
A second provision bans the purchase or construction of any facility inside the United States for housing detainees now being held at Guantánamo. The administration has proposed acquiring a prison in Thomson, Ill., for the purpose of holding several dozen detainees it says are too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute.
A third provision forbids the transfer of any detainee to another country unless Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates signs off on the safety of doing so. That ban would not apply to any detainees who are ordered released by federal judges.
These provisions passed in the still-Democratic House by 341-48, and in the Democratically-controlled Senate by unanimous consent.
These were not close votes. They were not votes that could be flipped through presidential pressure. The Democrats abandoned the president on Gitmo. They abandoned him so completely that it became impossible to close the prison or to try the detainees in civilian courts on American soil. The primary blame for this lies with the Republicans’ willingness to fearmonger the issue, but secondary blame falls with Democrats from the far left to the center-right.
And the result is a national failure and one more stain on our nation’s history and reputation.
