Moments after Scott Roeder, the apparent trigger-man in the George Tiller murder, was apprehended, I (only half jokingly) asked friends if Roeder should be subjected to Bush-Cheney “enhanced interrogations.”  It was somewhat debatable (at least at the time) whether Roeder should be thought of as a true domestic terrorist or a run-of-the-mill criminal, an assassin.

Apparently, in the wake of what Roeder told the A.P., Roeder should definitely be lumped in more with the jihadists than with Mark David Chapman:

[Roeder] claimed from his jail cell Sunday that similar violence was planned around the nation for as long as the procedure remained legal[.]

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“I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal,” Roeder said. When asked by the AP what he meant and if he was referring to another shooting, he refused to elaborate further.

So we now have a threat of imminent violence against a general, if not specifically identified, target.  KSM anyone?  This all begs the question: what does the federal government, i.e. President Obama, do in order to protect American citizens?

For a moment, let’s table issues of constitutional rights, protections of citizenship and international law, and instead focus on morality.  Is there a moral right, or even obligation, to subject someone, who is threatening/promising murderous violence, to coercive physical interrogation in order to elicit information that may save lives?  I suspect the claim that “torture doesn’t work” would ring hollow if your loved one performed (late term) abortions.

The point here is that even if you have an absolute moral opposition to all things even approaching torture, these issues can get a little thorny in the “ticking time bomb” scenario.  And, lest we forget there are issues of moral in-equivalence — murdering one abortion doctor is simply not the moral equivalent of murdering thousands of civilians — as well as pragmatism — torturing a Muslim is probably more likely to incite jihadists to terrorism than torturing Roeder is to inciting crazy rightwingers to more assassinations.

Byron York had a very interesting piece up over the weekend on how Gitmo has, or may have (depending on your p.o.v.), served as a rallying cry for jihadists.  I suggest everyone read the entire piece, but I’ll summarize the major points below.

Of all the arguments advanced for closing the $200 million Gitmo prison facility, by far the most compelling is that it has served, and continues to serve, as a major recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups.  When asked this Sunday on Meet the Press, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), who joins the President’s position on Gitmo, identified only one source in support of that claim: Major Matthew Alexander.

For those unfamiliar, Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for a former Air Force officer, who lead an interrogation team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006.  According to his bio, Maj. Alexander personally conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq, supervised more than 1,000 others, and was involved in the interrogations that led to the killing of al Qaeda-in-Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  His experiences and conclusions about what drove the foreign fighter insurgency are detailed in this Washington Post op-ed and his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brain, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest man in Iraq. 

In sum, Maj. Alexander opines that “the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”  The Major’s conclusions, taken at face value, present a troubling dilemma: while abuses at Abu Ghraib are well documented with incriminating photography on display for the entire Muslim world, evidence of “abuse” at Gitmo is far more elusive.  The only celebrated allegation was a May 2005 story in Newsweek alleging that U.S. operatives had flushed a Koran down a toilet.  However, the report, based on a single anonymous source, was eventually retracted and Newsweek ultimately apologized.

Thus, while Maj. Alexander may be 100% correct that Gitmo has been used as a recruitment tool for terrorists, the stories of abuse at Gitmo don’t seem to have a factual predicate, and Newsweek apparently served as a propagandist for al-Qaeda and other Muslim terrorists.

Obama on the idea of transferring hundreds of terrorists to American prisons, Thursday, May 21:

Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders – highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety. As we make these decisions, bear in mind the following fact: nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal “supermax” prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.

The reality of the situation, also on Thursday, May 21:  NYC terror plot foiled.  The plotters were radicalized in prison.

Amid all the shocking details in the disrupted plot to bomb Bronx synagogues and fire missiles at American military aircraft, one component of the case should come as no surprise – three of the alleged culprits converted to radical Islam in prison.

Radical Islamists have targeted prison populations for recruitment for years. That’s where Jose Padilla, suspected of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb and convicted of conspiracy to murder people overseas and of providing material support to terrorists, converted and was radicalized.

So, the danger regarding these terrorists isn’t solely whether they will escape or not, but also their potential to radicalize other prisoners in the system.  This is something Obama did not address in his speech and it would be helpful to the ongoing debate if he would do so at some point. 

Can Obama pledge that none of the terrorists transferred to American prisons will have exposure to the general prison population?  I’m sure that they are not going to be kept in isolation–that would be akin to torture, wouldn’t it? 

The last thing we want to do is help radical Islamists create a viable terror organization within our prison system through which they can plot further attacks.

Further, I’m not sure why it is okay to lock terror suspects up indefinitely in the United States, while it is somehow against our values to do the same thing in a prison on an American base at Gitmo (one which was called ‘humane’ by the Obama Administration’s own review).  Unless, of course, Obama plans on releasing these prisoners at some point, which begs the question: Into which country will they be released?

Will Obama pledge to never release these terror suspects into the United States?  Details, please…

Christopher,

The motives of the ”shutter Gitmo” advocates vary enough not to be easily pigeon-holed.  For sure, a large block of the Left seeks to advance a transformed America, as you identify.  But, that’s not necessarily true of all of them, nor is it the case that calls for Gitmo closure should be casually dismissed by the Right.  It’d be helpful to hear a compelling argument from someone on this blog for the need to close Gitmo asap.

As to Fred Kaplan, Dick Cheney and the Left, the former Veep long ago emerged as one of those eternal boogeymen that fuels the juices of true blue members of the Left.  And, while Kaplan’s feckless attack lacked any meaningful detail (“Cheney . . . built a case on straw men, red herrings, and lies.”) – indeed, I can just as easily, and conclusorily, reply that Kaplan built his critique on straw men, red herrings and lies – that doesn’t mean Cheney is going to emerge as an effective spokesman for the Right.  In fact, far from it, if yesterday’s face-off was any indication.  PBHO is simply playing a different ball game when it comes to communication.

In the end, I suspect we’ll see Cheney effective at moving policy, but less effective at swaying the public on himself, the Bush Administration, or the Republican Party.

Just read this piece by Fred Kaplan over at Slate that purports to expose Dick Cheney’s ‘lying’ in his speech on torture yesterday as opposed to Obama, who “…spelled out his logic, backed up his talking points with facts, and put forth a policy grounded—at least in his view—not just in lofty ideals but also in hardheaded assessments of national security.”

But it strikes me that if the case for Cheney lying in the speech was so strong, why does Kaplan resort to writing:

In short, his speech was classic Dick Cheney, with all the familiar scowls and scorn intact. The Manichean worldview, which Cheney advanced and enforced while in office, was on full display.

So what if Cheney was scowling and scornful!  That doesn’t mean he was lying.  Kaplan and his ilk just can’t get beyond this obsessive need to caricature.  What does it mean to say the speech was ‘classic Dick Cheney?’  Certainly, it could mean different things to different people.  One wonders if Kaplan even listens to what the man has to say.

But speaking of lies, Kaplan produces a whopper…

And nobody is claiming that the subjects of interrogation were “victims,” much less “innocent.” To decry torture does not imply the slightest sympathy for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Really?  Nobody thinks that?  What about Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times?  Does a writer for the paper of record count?  Because in this column, he’s pretty clear about what he thinks of the inmates at Gitmo:

…most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect…

…over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

When you take sentiments like Kristof’s and then add to it the fact that dozens of ACLU lawyers have been rushing to represent the worst of the worst at Gitmo, you can’t credibly say that nobody has ’slightest sympathy’ for KSM and his cohorts.  It’s just not true.  Otherwise, there would be no great outcry over the use of waterboarding.

Finally, Kaplan does his best imitation of Obama and paints with as broad a brush as possible, with no actual facts to back up his claims:

Nobody is claiming that Osama Bin Laden and his crew would go away if we treated prisoners more nicely. However, it is indisputable that the reports of torture, the photos from Abu Ghraib, and the legal limbo at Guantanamo have galvanized al-Qaida’s recruitment campaigns. Everyone acknowledges this, hardly just “the Left.” It’s why many Republicans lamented the news stories and the photographs—because they might help the enemy.

Is it indisputable that reports of torture have helped the enemy?  Where is the proof?  Does Kaplan really think that people are joining Al-Quaeda because America waterboarded KSM?  Why did they join Al-Quaeda in 1999, when we weren’t waterboarding people?  Note that Kaplan deftly inserts the Abu Ghraib incident to bolster his case, which is supposed to be about Gitmo, after all.

And, of course, now everyone acknowledges this according to Kaplan, just like nobody had sympathy for the detainees.  Kaplan is so busy talking about what everyone and nobody is doing that he forgets the point of his column, which was that Cheney was lying.

But he never actually proved that.  He just knows that Cheney was speaking, so it must be untrue.

Really, the only thing he proved was that opinions like Kaplan’s are indeed worthy of Cheney’s scowl and scorn.

Bill, I think you are spot on. 

To me, though, the purpose of harping on things like Gitmo, enhanced interrogation, etc., is so that America’s actions can be conflated with those of other nasty countries around the world.  Once the idea of America’s moral superiority has been vanquished–something the Left appears eager to achieve despite crocodile tears to the contrary–then that opens the way for greater change at home. 

To wit, if America is no better than any other country, then there’s nothing exceptional about it, and it there is nothing exceptional, then we don’t need to adhere to set traditions like the free market, or a powerful military with a leadership role in the world.  And once those things are out of the way, then the citizenry should march in lockstep to a Western Europe-style social democracy.  After all, we’d just be a bigger Belgium, or a more populous Canada at that point.

Using Gitmo as a hammer is part of this whole goal.

I’m still digesting that part of President Obama (PBHO)’s National Archives speech addressed to the disposition of Guantanamo Bay detainees.  While the president seems rhetorically committed to closing Gitmo, his fervor to expend political capital in that pursuit remains, at best, suspect .

The movement to close Gitmo has always perplexed me.  At bottom, the colorable arguments for shutting the facility down are grounded strictly in symbolism – which is not to say that symbolic gestures can’t produce tangible benefits: like, for example, quelling passions the facility has provoked and terminating a rallying cry to violent Islamic radicalism.  But does the symbolism outweigh the consequences?

Gitmo is a highly secure, $200 million state-of-the-art facility, surrounded by miles and miles of water.  It’s outfitted with court rooms for the types of military-style tribunals, once conceived by the Bush Administration, which PBHO now says he intends to use to prosecute some Gitmo detainees.  And, perhaps most important, the prisoner conditions inside Gitmo (at least as they exist today) are cleaner and otherwise far superior to most federal prisons.  With the Supreme Court now having accorded the right of habeas corpus to detainees held at Gitmo, one might wonder: what’s the rush? 

If - as appears to be the case - Gitmo is both legally neutral and safer, cheaper, and better for detainees than moving them onshore, is it really worth shuttering the facilities as a purely symbolic gesture simply to curry international favor?