Guantanamo: Obama’s ‘Patch’ Is Worse than the Hole

It was one of the election promises of Obama’s 2008 presidential candidacy that was liked by many — more in Europe than in America: closing Guantanamo. Guantanamo is the symbolic prison of contempt for human rights and the legality of Bush Jr.’s “total” war on terrorism.

The “messiah” Obama of 2008 elevated the rude ideology and operational mediocrity of the Republican administration. He said the closing would take place “within a year.” The year has passed; four more years have passed, too. We are already in the second term: Guantanamo is still there with its detainees — fewer than before, but still many at 186* — awaiting trial or even just indictment, or a reason for being detained as prisoners as “enemy fighters.”

Some of them were judged, and more than a few were transferred to their country of origin, among the many embarrassments. At times it seemed right to give them to butchers, while other times the home governments did not know what to do with them; there was no motive for keeping them in prison — or maybe there was, but the reason was ignored — but to free them right away would be a snub to the U.S.

The latest solution seems to be a patch worse than the hole: sending the detainees to Yemen and closing Guantanamo in Cuba to open one in the Persian Gulf. Something Pontius Pilate would do, not something Obama from the new American dream would do.

How do I say this: These men, me, Barack, us, America, all of us, the Western world, we just wash our hands of it. Unable to treat them according to justice, our justice, we deliver them to a dubious and “minor” justice, which all of us consider, maybe out of a preconception, less of a guarantee than our justice, surely less attentive to the protection of human rights. Everyone asks: I commit a crime and can choose to end up in the U.S. prison or the one in Yemen; where do I go?

Without taking into account that, even in the grimmest interpretations of protection against terrorism, Yemen, even if things have changed in recent years, remains a state porous to al-Qaida and fundamentalist infiltrations, open to terroristic temptations — not coincidentally, the majority of the 186 in Guantanamo are from there. The United States has already suffered attacks [there], starting pre-Sept. 11, 2001 with the one on the USS Cole in the Aden harbor entrance.

In Obama’s speech on Thursday, the candidate of 2008 is recognized: “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror;’” he said [this] the day after the attack in London, which could lead to an opposite stance, and put the CIA back to intelligence work. But, the idea of “transferring” Guantanamo without actually closing it — and having to think more on the budget costs than the cost on conscience — and the limitation, but not the suspension, of the use of drones in killer missions are concessions to reality and negations of the dream.

*Editor’s note: There are 166 prisoners, not 186.