Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

World plays "Hot Potato" with Guantanamo prisoners

President Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp wasn’t made in order to earn political points at home (since Americans' opinion on the release is very divided), but it's also not earning him many gold stars from our friends overseas either.

According to a Rasmussen poll reporting in early April:
Just 36% [of Americans] now agree with the president’s decision to close the prison camp for suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. Forty-six percent (46%) oppose closing the prison camp, and 18% are undecided.
Americans are united on one thing. Seventy five percent of them don’t want Gitmo inmates on American soil. To be fair, the Rasmussen poll asked respondents if they “wanted Guantanamo inmates released in this country,” a very vague statement, implying that they might move into the foreclosed house next door. Such can be the ambiguous nature of polling.

The world that was appalled by Guantanamo, is now just as appalled at the thought of housing its inmates within its own hallowed borders. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has spent the past week imploring European leaders to help relocate detainees that the United States would like to set free. Global leaders initially warmed to the idea of assisting the new American president, but are now fully thinking through the prospect of potential extremists living within their societies.

As one unidentified European official told the New York Times:
We understand, you have a big problem. And we appreciate what President Obama has said about closing Guantánamo. But that doesn’t automatically mean putting all the remaining inmates on a plane and sending them to Europe.
Many prisoners can’t be returned to their own countries because they could be persecuted there, or because their home countries can’t be trusted to keep tight enough surveillance on their activities, making Europe a good alternative choice for detainee resettlement.

Europeans would be more easily convinced to take detainees if Americans in turn, were willing to take some responsibility for their own prisoners of “war.” Homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was held in prisons in Oklahoma, Colorado and Indiana. As despicable as he was, we didn’t send him off to a foreign country.

Prisoners could be released from Guantanamo with one of many different statuses: complete freedom, supervised freedom or continued incarceration, and Europe wants to know just what kind of former detainees it could get. Some foreign ministers turn the Obama administration’s argument that the detainees would present no security risk on its head by asking, why in that case, can’t they stay in the United States?

Oddly, one town in Montana would like to take “the worst of the worst,” George W. Bush's exaggerated description of detainees. In a plan to rev up its economy, Hardin, Montana recently built a state-of-the-art jail, hoping to provide employment for 100 local residents. When prison business didn’t materialize, the town set its sights on hosting Guantanamo prisoners in their fresh, new prison cells. To Hardin's dismay, their Congressional delegation didn’t agree with their plan.

The Obama administration needs to decide just how much responsibility it will take for restarting the lives it put on hold when it confined terror suspects in Guantanamo. If some detainees present a security risk, wouldn't it be better to have those individuals close by where we can be sure they are under the watchful eye of our own intelligence agencies?

Then the government can focus its wire-tapping efforts on those guys and leave the rest of us alone.

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