Trying to Get Mo' Context about Gitmo

Recently, I read an article in my favorite magazine (at least when I want to feel intellectual), the New Yorker. The article, by Hendrik Hertzberg, detailed the drastic shift in public opinion regarding the rights (or lack thereof) of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. He opens with an anecdote about the treatment of several thousand Nazis under the command of General Erwin Rommel (incidentally, one of my favorite historical figures) who were captured by Allied forces in 1943. Though most Americans rightly viewed the Nazis with a fair amount of disgust and contempt, the prisoners were treated justly, in accordance with the Geneva conventions.

Fast forward to the present, and we have a situation with Guantanamo Bay that closely mirrors that event in 1943. The similarities are obvious: the United States is has captured many enemy combatants and doesn’t really know what to do with them. The differences are more subtle: unlike in 1943, there is a good chance that many prisoners in Guantanamo are not combatants at all, and have been wrongfully imprisoned without a trial. Also unlike in 1943, the prisoners in Guantanamo are not affiliated with any country, and as such it is much less likely that the U.S. be held accountable for any human rights abuses.

In 2008, Barack Obama ran on a platform to close Guantanamo Bay and end the United States’ policy of illegally detaining and torturing prisoners. As Hertzberg points out, public opinion was overwhelmingly in support of this position. However, this didn’t last long. Though Obama signed an executive order early in his presidency to close Gitmo, it’s clear that it was never a priority. It was a priority, though, for others to exploit an easily scared public to make sure that the prisoners (or the more acceptably and vaguely termed “detainees”) were locked up indefinitely without trial.

It’s difficult for many Americans, myself included, to watch a situation unfolding that has such strong ties to a World War II moment. I’m not speaking of the German POW scenario Hertzberg mentioned; the just handling of such a demonstrably evil group of individuals is a source of national pride. I refer instead to the Japanese internment camps, a mistake that goes down as one of the greatest human rights abuses in our nation’s history. Some may claim that, while virtually all of the Japanese-Americans held in internment camps were innocent of any wrongdoing, a large number of Guantanamo detainees are terrorists plotting to destroy the U.S. If this is so, however, why not put them on trial? If they are so clearly guilty, why not lay out the evidence in a civilian court and justify locking them up for good? There are no easy answers to this question, mostly because only one side is morally justifiable. Someday Americans will look back on this event as one in which political expediency trumped morality, in which the popular position trumped the principled one. On a lighter note, this horrible betrayal of everything America stands for also gave us "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay", a movie which, despite myself, I found very funny.