No, not complicated at all

By Jeremy

Andy thinks Guantanamo presents a real and crippling challenge for Obama, now that those slogans about shutting it down (how crazy!) and resuming the rule of law (how pointlessly esoteric!) must meet the reality of power:

How easy to repeat the Left’s street slogans on Guantanamo Bay. How much harder once you are president and must face the consequences of closing a jail that houses such extremely dangerous men, many beyond the ability of a domestic court to wisely try:

And he quotes an article from The Australian that argues that:

PRESIDENT Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo Bay within a year appears to be unravelling with the emergence of former inmates on terrorist websites, fierce opposition in the US and a lukewarm response to taking detainees from the European Union.

Of course, to people like Andrew – who appear not to understand what “the rule of law” means – the above might look insurmountable. But they’re not.

Since when has the criminal behaviour of released prisoners justified holding all prisoners indefinitely? (If that’s what some former detainee appearing “on a terrorist website” equates to.) And yes, there probably is “fierce opposition” in the US to any change in the Guantanamo policy – from the people who created the unjust system in the first place. The ones who just lost an election fought precisely on issues like this. And the Europeans not wanting to detain people the Americans can’t justify detaining is hardly surprising – or, if the whole point is ending unjustified, unjust detention, any problem at all.

This is how criminal justice works: if you have evidence that a person has committed a crime, or is about to commit a crime, you arrest them and charge them with that crime (or attempting that crime). Terrorists are just organised criminals – just like the Mafia, or any other group of psychotic nutbags.

The people in Guantanamo don’t present any great difficulty that the criminal justice system hasn’t dealt with for centuries. The criminal justice system is not floored when you present it with heinous villainy – it’s seen it all. And it knows the best way to deal with it: consistently, openly, fairly, justly. If you have evidence, charge ‘em. If you don’t, let ‘em go. Because, like all of us, they are innocent until proven guilty.

And that’s not a meaningless catch-phrase. Because anything short of this is tyranny – it gives the power of judge, jury and executioner to random people in the security forces, with no oversight, and no rules – nothing to protect us from capricious abuses of power by the state or random agents with authority. It’s a very quick slippery slope – you give people unchecked power, and even the best will slide into abusing it. The ordinary person – much quicker. People are not saints. You might trust everyone in the police force or government with your freedom, and trust that they need no rules to restrain them from abusing it, but I suspect you’d be in for a surprise if your interests and theirs ever happened to conflict.

The point of which is – the rules are there for a reason. The system is there for a reason. We have the right to not be detained without the state putting the evidence before us and without having the opportunity to defend ourselves because if we don’t, then the state can do what it likes to us. And will.

Andy might like to patronisingly waffle on about the dreaded “consequences” of following the left’s evil plan to restore the rule of law – but he sadly entirely misses those of the (on this issue mis-named) conservatives’ plan to dismantle one of the most critical parts of it.

So, Guantanamo: evidence? Trial. No evidence? Free. That’s it. Entirely straightforward. If you have well-founded concerns about particular people, watch them, as you would investigate any other criminal you think is plotting a crime. But you don’t get to imprison people just because you think they’re villains, without evidence of their having committed (or attempted to commit) a crime. Short of testable, credible evidence against them, how can you even say that they’re “terrorists”?

It’s ridiculous that Guantanamo, operating on this principle, has detained these people without charge for as long as it has.

The cry before the election should be the same now: let them out. Today. The alternative, which inescapably means abandoning the basic protections against tyranny on which our freedoms are based, is far more dangerous to our civilization than anything a random nutbag could do. It’s as simple as that.

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