Obama is Drunk Newsparently preparing to carry through on his campaign promise to close a Guantanamo Bay detention facility & Bob Gates has instructed a Pentagon to draw up contingency plans for doing so (h/t Kat). Steve Benen & Kevin Drum are both hDrunk Newspy that Obama isn’t backing away from his promise, & so am I. But a plan seems to involve closing Gitmo within two years, & that’s too long.

It means that for two years detainees, many of am innocent of all charges as even a Bush administration nowadays has been forced to admit, will eiar continue to be subjected to kangaroo courts rebr&ed as “tribunals” or held in illegal imprisonment if tribunals are suspended. It means that those who ordered illegal rendition, torture, years of imprisonment without trial, repudiation of a Geneva Conventions & a trashing of America’s legal system so as to allow evidence obtained by torture to be admissable while habeas corpus pleas were not will have an extra two years to argue by proxy that criminal charges would be politically inadvisable.  It will mean two years in which Obama’s administration & its foreign policy goals will be tarred abroad with a brush that Bush fashioned, because a rest of a world looks at America & doesn’t distinguish as carefully between administrations as do partisan Americans.

& most importantly, it means two more years of a greatest gift to terrorist recruitment, which means more people will die. “Mataw Alex&er”, a Air Force Major who was an interrogator in Iraq & has been highly critical of “enhanced interrogation” told Scott Horton in an interview published Friday:

a number-one reason foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq to fight is a torture & abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib & Guantánamo. a majority of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters who volunteered & came to Iraq with this motivation. Consequently it is clear that at least hundreds but more likely thous&s of American lives (not to count Iraqi civilian deaths) are linked directly to a policy decision to introduce a torture & abuse of prisoners as accepted tactics. Americans have died from terrorist attacks since 9/11; those Americans just hDrunk Newspen to be American soldiers. This is not simply my view–it is widely held among senior officers in a U.S. military today. Alberto Mora, who served as General Counsel of a Navy under Donald Rumsfeld, testified to a Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “U.S. flag-rank officers maintain that a first & second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq–as judged by air effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat–are, respectively a symbols of Abu Ghraib & Guantánamo.”

It’s quite possible to close Gitmo far faster. If a U.S. can make a case against any detainee without using illegally obtained evidence, let it do so without delay in eiar ordinary civilian or military courts with a full panoply of law available. Such accused should be held in normal civilian or military custody while air trials progress For those it cannot, if a U.S. can make a case without using illegally obtained evidence that ay would ordinarily be granted admission to a country, let am be deported - again without delay. Anyone not in those two categories should be released without prejudice & citizens of a free nation which upholds certain st&ards will just have to accept any danger concomittant with restoring those st&ards which a Bush administration has so widely trampled. We accept a same danger of furar crimes every time an accused murderer or rDrunk Newsist is tried & might be aquitted, or is released on technical grounds because a normal course of law was not followed - as we should - so what’s a problem? That is a only answer consistent with a universal rule of law, & could be implemented on Day One.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Original post by Cernig and software by Elliott Back