by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Over the last decade Barack Obama \u2014 in campaign mode for various state and federal offices \u2014 repeatedly denounced the Bush-era security protocols as either unlawful or of little utility. Indeed, few political figures made the case so unremittingly that the United States had gone rogue in its zealotry to fight terror.<\/p>\n To perpetual candidate Obama, there were no tragic choices, no hazy areas of human frailty, no recognition that well-intentioned public servants were doing their best under trying circumstances to keep Americans safe, and to do so as humanely as possible. Instead, the so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d became an easy target for a demagogue worried more about scoring political points than about understanding the plight of his country at war.<\/p>\n Rendition? Obama once called that \u201cshipping away prisoners in the dead of night.\u201d<\/p>\n Military tribunals? They were nothing more than a \u201cflawed military commission system.\u201d<\/p>\n Preventive detention of terrorists? To Obama that was \u201cdetaining thousands without charge or trial.\u201d<\/p>\n How about the surge of troops into Iraq? \u201cNot working.\u201d<\/p>\n And the Patriot Act? \u201cShoddy and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n But nothing so roused candidate Obama\u2019s scorn as the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. To him, it was a \u201csad chapter in American history\u201d; \u201ca legal black hole\u201d; \u201ca false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus\u201d; etc. On the stump he serially caricatured it before cheering audiences as some sort of Soviet-style gulag. Not once but in succession he vowed to close it down by January 2010, to mark a symbolic year\u2019s period of change in the era of Obama.<\/p>\n But that might not happen quite so easily. Around 50 to 60 prisoners who have been released have returned to some sort of terrorist activity \u2014 most recently the Guantanamo alumnus Yousef Mohammed al-Shihri, who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and was killed earlier this month in a terrorist operation at the Saudi-Yemeni border.<\/p>\n Apparently few foreign governments want back their own home-grown terrorists who have been caught on the battlefield \u2014 unless we pay huge bribes and quit worrying whether the released prisoners might be tortured or summarily executed upon their arrival home.<\/p>\n Indeed, many nations may have put themselves in a rough spot: If it was rather easy to slur the cowboy Bush as a Nazi-like jailer who wouldn\u2019t close down his shop of horrors and release innocent suspects, it is harder to deal with a kinder, gentler Obama who wants to release terrorist-killers into their care.<\/p>\n Candidate Obama often sounded as if he had always assumed that Bush first created Guantanamo as a monument to his Constitution-shredding paranoia, and only later filled it with largely innocent prisoners. At one point Obama offered his Senate office to help lawyers sue on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners.<\/p>\n But as President Obama has discovered \u2014 just as he has dropped his campaign talk of ending renditions, tribunals, wiretaps, and intercepts, and of rapidly withdrawing from Iraq \u2014 Guantanamo is a bad choice among a number of worse ones.<\/p>\n In declared wars against uniformed enemies, we might \u2014 as we did during World War II \u2014 build POW camps and detain captured enemies until the peace was ratified. Even in nebulous wars like the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, there were most often uniformed fighters, and formal written intentions, armistices, and declarations that marked the beginning or ending of hostilities.<\/p>\n But after 9\/11, we faced an enemy that had attacked the continental United States in a deadly fashion beyond the ability of the Nazis, imperial Japanese, and Soviets, but without uniforms \u2014 or even conventional military forces as we had known them in the past. Yet al Qaeda and its Taliban sympathizers were not quite a handful of criminals who could be individually tried and convicted for terrorist acts, given that there were thousands of radical Islamists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border who had committed mayhem \u2014 both on the field of battle as combatants, and in foreign sanctuaries as architects of terrorism.<\/p>\n The ad hoc solution at Guantanamo sprang up, in other words, for want of a better idea of what to do with hundreds of such captured monsters. Were we to put them all on much-celebrated trials, with public defenders or publicity-seeking radical pro bono lawyers, with changes of venue to fairer jury pools in Berkeley or Madison, and with intricate legal disputes over contaminated evidence in Waziristan and lack of\u00a0Miranda<\/em>\u00a0warnings in Kandahar?<\/p>\n The problems of Guantanamo\u2019s existence transcend George W. Bush. That truth is evidenced by the reluctance of Obama himself to summarily close it down, and of his aficionados abroad to make his task easier by accepting their own detained nationals, and of his liberal supporters to extend the same sort of invective to him as they did to Bush for not shutting it down.<\/p>\n But there is one other problem with closing Guantanamo \u2014 perhaps the greatest of the paradoxes that will plague Obama. Since he took office, there has been a marked increase in Predator assassination strikes, both inside Pakistan and on its borders. Indeed, in just nine months Obama has approved more Predator strikes than did George Bush in three years. By some accounts, dozens, maybe hundreds, of terrorist suspects and their families have been obliterated from the air since January 2009. In a few cases, women and children near the intended targets have also gone up in the Hellfire-induced smoke; in others we have tragically hit the wrong targets and executed the innocent.<\/p>\n Yet once the Obama administration went down the path of redefining war as courtroom procedure, and assuming that the United States was somehow amoral in not extending habeas corpus and American jurisprudence to captured terrorists, then almost everything the United States does in our newly dubbed \u201coverseas contingency operations\u201d is ripe for legal scrutiny.<\/p>\n Personally, if I were a terrorist suspect, I\u2019d rather be picked up by a Special Forces team in the Hindu Kush, be shipped to Cuba, have my case reviewed by military lawyers, be allowed a Middle Eastern diet, and be provided with a Koran and arrows pointing to Mecca than simply wait to have my head exploded without warning by a Hellfire missile, while sitting inside my mud-brick hideout in Waziristan alongside my soon-to-be-incinerated family.<\/p>\n When Bush ordered such Predator attacks, it was seen as part of a brutal war, in which the United States had few options to stop terrorists from committing another 9\/11. In such a messy, horrific struggle, Predators \u2014 like Guantanamo \u2014 were seen as terrible choices amid more terrible alternatives.<\/p>\n But not now. An administration that wants to investigate former CIA officials for their part in Guantanamo, assures the Europeans and the UN that \u201cBush did it,\u201d and has made the case that America\u2019s name was sullied through unnecessary and cruel detentions, surely cannot become investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in one millisecond from the skies over Pakistan. Sorry, no such leeway is allowed messianic moralists.<\/p>\n Even the charismatic Barack Obama cannot convince his liberal base for long that it is horribly wrong to waterboard Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of the mass-murdering on 9\/11, but perfectly fine to incinerate an al-Qaeda suspect along with noncombatants in his general vicinity.<\/p>\n In short, Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded for those who loudly promise to undo George Bush\u2019s work, not to trump him.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Obama threw many stones at Bush, and now lives in a glass house. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Over the last decade Barack Obama \u2014 in campaign mode for various state and federal offices \u2014 repeatedly denounced the Bush-era security protocols as either unlawful or of little utility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[651],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-zc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-on-terror-bush-without-the-stetson\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":0},"title":"The War on Terror–Bush Without the Stetson","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 13, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There is much to criticize about President Obama on foreign policy, but increasingly, despite all the \u201creset button\u201d rhetoric and the obligatory nods to the Left, his anti-terrorism policies are becoming near identical extensions (if in cynical fashion) of George Bush\u2019s.\u00a0 I can\u2019t think\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "April 2010"","block_context":{"text":"April 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/april-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1910,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/who-is-the-enemy\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":1},"title":"Who Is the Enemy?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0don't think anyone knows quite what this administration's anti-terrorism policy is. Last August, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, lambasted the Bush administration, citing \"the inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole and intellectual narrowness that has often characterized the debate over the president's national security policies\" and criticizing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2010"","block_context":{"text":"January 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/january-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5911,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-borg\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":2},"title":"The Obama Borg","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"How \"man-caused disasters\" replaced Islamist terrorism in the Obama lexicon. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0lore, the Borg\u00a0was a collective of servile drone operatives that sought to assimilate other species into\u00a0its \u201chive mind.\u201d Something akin to that creepy groupthink arose when the Obama administration took power and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1621,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/of-laureates-and-cowboys\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":3},"title":"Of Laureates and Cowboys","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In politics, having power and keeping it often mean fudging a little on ideology. So conservatives sometimes convince the country to do very liberal things \u2014 think of Richard Nixon going to China, Ronald Reagan granting a blanket amnesty to illegal aliens, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2010"","block_context":{"text":"May 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/may-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1807,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/politically-correct-killing\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":4},"title":"Politically Correct Killing?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama needs to clarify his anti-terrorism policy. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online By all accounts, President Obama has vastly increased the number of Predator drone strikes during his 13 months in office and expanded the theater of missile operations by thousands of square miles. Indeed, since inauguration day,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2010"","block_context":{"text":"March 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/march-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2182,"position":5},"title":"Obama Derangement Syndrome?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u2019d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you\u2019ve lost your mind. \u2014 John Edwards When does the legitimate \u201cI oppose Obama\u201d descend into the illegitimate \u201cI hate Obama\u201d? It is popular now to suggest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2182"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2185,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2182\/revisions\/2185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}