President Obama should follow the same wise instinct that led him to reverse himself on trying terrorists before military commissions and reverse his rash campaign promise to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Why? Because closing Gitmo is a serious misreading of the motives of both critics from the international left and al Qaeda. The first won’t be placated by the closing of the prison, and the second may well be emboldened.
The case for keeping Guantanamo Bay open begins with the almost universal acknowledgement today that the facility itself is an orderly and humane place; a place where detainees receive better food, medical care and respect for their personal dignity than they would in prisons in the various countries they hail from.
No less an authority than Attorney General Eric Holder has acknowledged that the attempts to portray Guantanamo Bay as a Caribbean Lubyanka have failed. The terrorists still there are truly the worst of the worst, the result of a careful vetting process both prior to and after their arrival.
But the administration knows this, which is why it has confined its arguments for closing Gitmo to essentially two: One, that the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay without recourse to the American judicial system is a recruitment tool for al Qaeda; and two, that the very existence of the prison has damaged America’s standing in the world.
On the first point, President Obama has simply asserted – without offering any evidence – that Guantanamo Bay has made America less safe by luring new recruits to jihad. In his speech at the National Archives last week, President Obama claimed that “the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained” and backed up his assertion with…nothing. The administration’s standard of proof, high when it comes to demanding evidence that enhanced interrogation techniques prevented terrorism, vanishes when it comes to Guantanamo Bay fueling terrorism.
But in fact, history shows that closing Guantanamo Bay, not keeping it open, will provide the real boost to al Qaeda’s recruitment operations. Historically, it has been American retrenchments, such as our withdrawal from Somalia in the 1990s, that have served as propaganda tools for al Qaeda recruiting.
As Vice President Cheney said in his remarkable speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, closing Guantanamo Bay won’t cause terrorists to “stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along.”
Closing Gitmo is more likely to have the opposite result: Convincing Bin Laden and his allies, once again, that the United States is a “paper tiger” that lacks the political will for the long war against radical Islam. It will bring more terrorists to the fight, not fewer.
The President’s second argument for closing the prison is closely related to the first: That the stain of Guantanamo, in addition to inciting terrorists, is discouraging our friends and allies around the world from cooperating with us in fighting terrorism. Closing the facility, the President assures us, will make the French and the Germans respect us again.
But here President Obama’s argument runs up against the inescapable reality of Guantanamo Bay: The problem is not the facility, the problem is the terrorists housed within it.
In his speech last week, the President acknowledged that there is a hardened cadre of terrorists at Guantanamo who can neither be tried nor released. Closing Guantanamo will mean that these terrorists will have to be brought to some similar facility on U.S. soil. There, as at Gitmo, they will have to be held in isolation. There, as at Gitmo, their detention will be indefinite.
How long will it be until this new facility – whether it’s in Kansas or Virginia or Hawaii – becomes the new Guantanamo? How long will it be before the left wing both at home and abroad starts complaining about how this new prison is an affront to human rights and a stain on America’s reputation in the world?
The administration must face facts: It’s not Guantanamo Bay that irritates the international left, it’s the very fact that the United States has chosen to fight, rather than accommodate, the jihadist wing of Islam. And it’s not Guantanamo Bay that incites terrorism, but the very existence of America and other free and democratic countries.
Closing Guantanamo won’t bring us the good will of European leftists or al Qaeda terrorists. Only surrender will do that. Mr. President, keep Gitmo open!
Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and non-fiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation, and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see http://newt.org. His exclusive column for the Examiner appears Fridays.
