In commenting on Barack Obama’s renewed pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, Con Coughlin observes that most of the assembled army of Al Qaeda jihadists currently confined there would likely be released for lack of evidence, if the United States mandated their transfer to the civilian court system for trial. He then wonders aloud:
There have already been suggestions that former Gitmo detainees have carried out terror attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq after being released from Gitmo. What if one of those released by President Obama then masterminded a repeat of the 9/11 attacks?
(Daily Telegraph)
For some of us, it is astonishing that there can be an assumption made by anyone that future terrorist attacks wouldn’t happen, should one precipitate the release of the Gitmo rogues gallery. The question before us would seem to be merely one of scale and target location. It is after all extremely implausible that upon their release, the detainees would suddenly and collectively renounce their violent religious war or its tactics, as an act of reciprocal beneficence.
But for the pedestrian critic of Gitmo, our astonishment would perhaps be unfairly generous, as it presumes they’d bothered to contemplate potential consequences of any kind. Most conversations with the common critic readily reveals their enthusiasm for the cause doesn’t extend much beyond an immediate and passionate moral imperative for closure. That’s a fantastically weak but nevertheless very real apology for them.
It should be clear however that this is an apology which cannot be extended to the political leadership, as the incoming Obama administration appears to support closure on more cynical grounds. That is, the administration supports it as a kind of diplomatic gambit to rehabilitate America’s image abroad, most specifically in Western Europe. The necessity or potential military benefits of that motive being wholly dubious, objection to the proposal should be amplified by its direct marriage of cynicism with futility. After all, if the animating moral imperative is absent, one might at least insist on a disposition toward utility.
The dissociative signal sent from the Obama camp of an awareness of the security risks sustained by detainee release can thus come as little comfort, as it demonstrates further the existance of this separate cause and a prioritization of the geopolitical objective. And the further it is demonstrated that the administration’s purpose is driven by preference for a cynical futility, the more worrisome the policy horizon should become.