Obama gives up on making America Palau

posted at 3:29 pm on June 12, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has given up the idea that any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay could get released in the US.  Facing intense and bipartisan opposition from Congress and a hostile electorate, the White House has shifted focus to finding other countries willing to take the captured detainees.  So far, though, the offers have been few and far between:

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.

Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers. An administration official said the United States is engaged in negotiations with other countries, including Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific, to find places for the remaining 13 Uighurs held at Guantanamo.

The Uighurs, who were ordered released by a federal judge last year, never counted America as an enemy, according to the men’s lawyers and human rights groups, giving the administration grounds to argue that they should live in the United States. Picked up in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2002, the Uighurs were later cleared of the “enemy combatant” label but remained in minimum-security confinement at Guantanamo.

Attempting to settle non-Uighur detainees in the United States would generate even greater congressional opposition, and the administration has decided not to pursue it broadly, an administration official said yesterday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. But he said there may yet be “a few” candidates for settlement in the United States among the dozens of Guantanamo detainees who have been cleared for release.

First, let’s explode the meme that the Uighurs were never an enemy of the US.  Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network explicitly declared war on the United States and called for the killing of Americans around the world in February 1998.  By that time, AQ had already staged attacks on American soldiers at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; later in 1998, bin Laden would order the bombing of two American embassies in Africa, and two years later the attack on the USS Cole.  And all of that happened well before the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people and forced America to acknowledge the war bin Laden had declared more than three years earlier.

The Uighurs joined al-Qaeda and trained at their camps in Tora Bora and elsewhere after that declaration of war, and certainly after AQ started attacking Americans.  They knew full well that AQ was conducting attacks on the US, as well as a number of other countries.  They have the same status as any other AQ member: enemies of the US during a time of war.  The US has no responsibility nor any cause to determine their state of mind when they joined, no more than we did with Nazi troops captured in World War II.  In fact, they volunteered to join AQ.  All we need is to have military tribunals that establish that fact, and that status should be enough to keep them locked up for the duration of the conflict.

But this may go on forever, critics will complain.  Surely you can’t mean that we keep them locked up for life? Absolutely.  We didn’t declare war on AQ; they declared war on us.  When their leadership surrenders itself or gets destroyed and the terrorists concede, then anyone captured during the hostilities will get released. Under the rules of war, we have absolutely no obligation to release anyone who allied themselves with AQ, whatever their motives. If they are stupid enough to join a terrorist organization that promises perpetual war against the US, then they can take the consequences of that decision — and serve as a deterrent for anyone else looking for a lifetime war against the US.

The problem with the Obama administration’s approach isn’t so much that they’re looking to release the detainees here in the US.  It’s that they’re looking for ways to release them at all.

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