Guantanamo Delusion
By William Finnegan
March 9, 2017
President Donald Trump has never been particularly lucid on the subject of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He is for it, of course. Early last year, at a campaign rally, he said, “I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which, by the way, which, by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open . . . and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” This cartoonish threat raised the question of where or in which putative wars the United States would find these new inmates. Trump seemed to think, in a later interview, that he could send Americans accused of terrorism to Guantánamo to be tried by military commissions ...
President Barack Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo, after having vowed to do so, was one of the sharper disappointments of his Administration. A draft of a Trump executive order, first leaked in January, which, among other things, cancels Obama’s 2009 order to close the prison, has been making the rounds. It orders the detention at Guantánamo of suspected members of “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.” Again, it is unclear where these detainees would come from, since even allies engaged in ground wars with these groups would almost certainly be unwilling to hand over prisoners for transfer to Guantánamo ...
To call Guantánamo a recruiting tool for jihadists is a political commonplace. And yet isis, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other jihadist groups do still employ it to great effect. James Foley, the American journalist who was captured and, in 2014, executed by isis, in Syria, told a Spanish fellow-prisoner that their captors had long wanted to create a kind of Guantánamo for their Western hostages. isis puts its foreign prisoners in orange jumpsuits, including for their executions, a gesture whose symbolism is lost on no one in the Islamic world. Even the Bush Administration, to some degree, came to understand Guantánamo as a strategic and moral fiasco, and began reducing the prisoner population, from a peak of six hundred and eighty-four, in 2003. Obama inherited two hundred and forty-two prisoners. He left office with forty-one still in place.
President Trump woke up on Tuesday and tweeted, “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” This was early, 7:04 a.m., and he was apparently just repeating something he had half-seen, and not understood, on “Fox and Friends.” According to the director of national intelligence, who is required to track former detainees, of the hundred and twenty-two ex-prisoners confirmed as having “reengaged,” a hundred and thirteen were released by the Bush Administration. Only nine people released by Obama have reëngaged, with another eleven suspected of doing so. This mistake was widely reported, and acknowledged by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, in response to reporters’ questions. Weirdly, however, it remains on both the President’s personal Twitter feed and his official one, linked to the White House Web site ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/president-trumps-guantanamo-delusion
