Democrats Deny Funding to Close Guantanamo

This is really shameful. Supposedly, the reason that Democrats in the Senate are refusing to provide funds to close Guantanamo is because they're worried about dangerous terrorists being released into the US. Putting aside the fact that most prisoners in Guantanamo were never terrorists in the first place, this argument gets the burden of proof backwards. The United States imprisoned these people indefinitely without charging them with any crime, tortured and humiliated them, and denied them access to their lawyers and the Red Cross. The US is the victimizer here, not the victim. The government has a moral obligation to close Guantanamo and free all the prisoners as quickly as possible, and it's sheer hypocrisy to cast the people that it has brutalized for the past seven years as a danger to Americans, when in fact it's the American government that has been engaged in immoral and illegal actions against them. We should be begging for their forgiveness, not arguing about where to keep them locked up.

Once again (see also here and here), this demonstrates that the Democrats are no great opponents of injustice. To their credit, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Atrios have ridiculed the Democrats' absurd fears that the prisoners will escape. However, the reasoning behind their criticisms leave something to be desired. None of them have questioned the underlying ideas behind the Democrats' arguments: that these people are "terrorists," that they are dangers to us rather than vice versa and that they are guilty until proven innocent.

Yglesias's argument is that "Closing the facility is important to rebuilding America’s international relationships." As with his argument that avoiding killing Afghan civilians is important because it hinders our policy objectives, he shows no interest in the fact that US policy is immoral, only what it means for US "national interests."

Kevin Drum also slams the Democrats, but comes to some pretty uninspiring conclusions:

I never expected Barack Obama to be anything other than pragmatic and center left. Still, I confess to feeling a little in the dumps lately over just how much he seems willing to bend and compromise on some key issues. But then I read things like this...

And I realize all over again just what Obama is up against. His own party won't support him against even the most transparent and insipid demagoguery coming from the conservative noise machine. The GOP's brain trust isn't offering even a hint of a substantive case that the U.S. Army can't safely keep a few dozen detainees behind bars in a military prison, but Dems are caving anyway. Because they're scared. And then they wonder why voters continue to think that a party that can be bitch slapped so easily might be viewed as weak on national security.

But that's the reality that Obama has to deal with. Under the circumstances, I guess he's not doing so badly after all.

Rather than concluding that the Democrats as a whole are a pro-war, anti-civil liberty party, his conclusion is that Obama's mis-steps aren't so bad. This is a great illustration of why it's dangerous to subordinate opposition to the war to the Democrats: when they inevitably refuse to repudiate war and injustice, there's no independent force to fight back, so you're left with no choice but to ultimately accept whatever it is the Democrats decide to do, no matter how awful it is.

Carl Levin Wants to Build a "Guantanamo North"

I find this funny in a really sick way: via Matt Yglesias, Democratic Senator Carl Levin wants to build a "Guantanamo North" in his home state, Michigan. What I find funny about this is the way that the needs of the "war on terror" dovetail with Obama's stimulus package: for Democrats, it's a two-birds-with-one-stone situation. Plus, Michigan is in a lot of economic pain because its auto industry is dying, so maybe building new prisons can help plug the hole. The prison-industrial complex is one of America's biggest growth industries, after all.

Yglesias says that we don't really need another prison, but he's blind to the irony of prison-building as a solution to Guantanamo, and certainly doesn't oppose expanding the prison-industrial complex on principle.

On a more serious note, the idea of Guantanamo North is a reminder of the fact that while Obama has curbed some of the abuses that happened at Guantanamo--granting prisoners there habeas corpus rights and ending the use of torture--he is continuing many of the foundations of Bush's enemy-combatant detention policy. He is relying on military commissions rather than civilian courts to try "enemy combatants." He is continuing to deny US prisoners held on foreign soil (at Bagram prison, for instance) all legal rights, leaving them even worse off than Guantanamo detainees were under Bush and safeguarding Bush's end-run around the US judicial system. He has also pledged to continue to incarcerate an undisclosed number of Guantanamo prisoners even if they are never convicted of any crime:

The most tricky category, Mr Obama said, would be those detainees who could not be prosecuted but who posed a "clear danger to the American people".

...

"We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people," he said.

Yet he asserts that this policy will somehow be "defensible and lawful."

Finally, there are the individuals who are already facing Guantanamo-like conditions within the US, which suggests that even if all the Guantanamo prisoners were transferred to the civilian courts (which Obama isn't even proposing), they would still likely be the victims of serious miscarriages of justice.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia user Piotrus.

The Audacity of Hope

Hilzoy has been doing great work documenting the miscarriage of justice against the Uighurs of Guantanamo. However, when it comes to drawing conclusions from this travesty, the best she can come up with is to hope for the best:

I was brought up to believe that when I made a mistake, I should admit it and try to do whatever I could to make it right. I think this is true of me, and I think that it is true of my country. We should not let innocent people languish in prison just because we are afraid, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they might do something bad. It's foolish -- it's not as though no one will be able to keep track of the Uighurs if they are released. But more than that, it's cowardly and ignoble.

I would hope that my country is better than that. I hope that we have the minimal decency not to allow ourselves to be convinced by demagogues that we should be afraid to admit our mistakes and try to make things right. I would hope that we would actually investigate charges that people were "trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001" before we decided to let them rot in jail for no good reason.

I'd hope we would have the grace to do this even if the person making the charges wasn't someone who blamed liberals for a murder in which a woman cut another woman's abdomen open and stole her unborn child.

And I would hope that politicians would show some leadership and remind us that we are better than this.

This gets at one of the basic paradoxes of liberalism. While liberals often identify real problems in our social, economic and political system, their solutions to these problems are inevitably constrained by what is possible within the limits of the status quo, rather than proposing to actually change the system. And they overwhelmingly place their hopes in politicians, ignoring the fact that successful reform movements are always based in mass social movements.

Thus Hilzoy, while invoking her faith in the righteousness of her fellow citizens, never thinks to mention the current state of the anti-war movement as one of the key determinants of whether there will actually be a full repudiation of the "war on terrorism." If she had, she would have seen that it is in a truly pathetic state, with the major liberal anti-war groups like UFPJ and MoveOn declaring victory after Obama's election, refusing to criticize Obama, and demobilizing their members.

Hilzoy says that "Barack Obama wants to close Guantanamo." But what has he done to roll back the abuses of the war on terrorism so far? He has refused to prosecute Bush administration officials for their crimes and even opposes a truth and reconciliation commission. He has promised to close Guantanamo, but he has left open loopholes in the prohibition against torture and secret prisons and defended the government’s right to hold terrorism suspects without charge and to invoke the state secrets privilege. And he has not stopped Bush-era miscarriages of justice, such as the prosecution of Syed "Fahad" Hashmi.

Liberals need to wake up to the fact that the Democrats are the other party of capitalism and imperialism. Obama is putting a kinder, gentler face on the war on terror, but he's not changing its fundamentals. The expansion of the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, the continuation of Bush-era legal policies and the delays in withdrawing from Iraq are all evidence that with the Democrats in power, the more things change, the more they stay the same.