What U.S. politicians don't seem to realize, as they argue and argue over what to do with the 172 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, is that holding people in a prison and giving them no clear indication of what will happen to them in the future is the very thing that the facility became notoriously symbolic of – torture.
President Barack Obama's Jan. 22, 2009 executive order, which pledged that "Gitmo" would be closed a year later, seems like the distant past now. It's two years later, and, still, nothing has been done.
Obama was unrealistic when he signed that order. It was literally one of the first things he did upon entering office; we can't even be sure he knew his way around the White House yet. Looking back, The Spectrum sees the move as indicative of the president's relative inexperience and naïveté at the time.
Now, he knows better than to idealistically assume that he can just make Gitmo go away; two years of battling with pesky Republicans have hardened him and knocked him back into sad reality. That doesn't change the fact that something must be done about the prison and its inhabitants.
Obama's attempts to move the prisoners to a facility in Illinois and to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM, the alleged "principal architect" of the 9/11 attacks) in New York City were both stymied by troupes of not-in-my-backyarders. We don't see their logic. Do these people forget that the prisons already in their "backyards" contain murderers and rapists?
As the president said, we should be careful to avoid elevating the alleged terrorists to a special level. Our justice and security systems are strong. We shouldn't have anything to be afraid of when it comes to the transport of prisoners – it happens all the time with dangerous people on American soil.
After all, nobody seemed to have a problem with keeping Timothy McVeigh in an American jail.
Terrorists or no terrorists, the detainees are entitled to their basic human rights, and they don't seem to be getting them right now. The right to a fair trial is the first on the list for many of the prisoners.
The irony in all of this is that KSM admitted his guilt and offered a full confession, along with four other detainees. It was a dare to the federal government to do something – anything – about it.
We're not lawyers, but one would think that it would be pretty easy to take to court a guy who is fully admitting his guilt.
But this is Washington that we're talking about – a place where nothing (involving actually getting something done) is easy. The easy thing, of course, is arguing about it, and that's what politicians will continue to do.
And far away from the war of words, in a detention camp ironically located in Cuba, the Gitmo prisoners will wait.
