A sign outside of a Church in Greenwich, New York, in April, 2008. While the Obama administration pledged to close Guantanamo Bay Prison by January of 2010, it has since said it would miss the deadline.
Image from Flickr/Sayan51 - see citation below.
When President Barack Obama spoke in Oslo, Norway, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he reiterated his pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. We don't always agree on everything, but we at New Security Action stand solidly behind that statement and believe in the President's promise to make this a reality.
Part of making the closing of Gitmo a reality involves finally bringing justice to the victims of terrorism by trying Gitmo detainees in court. The Obama Administration is also making strides in this direction, planning to house detainees here in the U.S. and beginning Grand Jury testimony in New York for the trials of 9/11 suspect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others. These steps will pave the way for Gitmo's eventual closure. They're necessary and they prove that we don't just talk the talk about our justice system. We know that it yields results.
And it has 195 times over since 2001, prosecuting and convicting terrorism suspects.
The reality is, we're imprisoning terrorists now and we've gone through all this before, successfully, with little fanfare. The U.S. has always prosecuted terrorists and has had no problems in handing out justice that is backed by our Constitution. But some people don't believe in the linchpin of our Democracy. Some people, in their efforts to keep Gitmo open, are playing politics, using fear to smear the federal courts.
Meet the non-believers.
From Talking Points Memo:
Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reason for their concern. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."
The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.
The group of conservative lawmakers have been arguing against bringing the Gitmo suspects to the U.S. ever since the decision was announced. They suggest, as do most Republicans and some Democrats, that the best way to try terror suspects is through military tribunals on the Guantanamo Bay base itself. Today, they repeated that argument. But they added new focus to their claim that the Constitution and bringing terrorists to justice can't mix.
American justice and weak should be oxymorons. The should be misnomers. They shouldn't even be standing next to each other, let alone coming out of the mouths of people who claim to believe in upholding the law. How can you be part of our government, part of Congress and not believe in the American Judicial System? They're basically calling themselves out as failures an frauds. Of course, they want to paint it as a security issue, when that's not really what this is about. This isn't about securing anything (accept for "securing" the vote of the right-wing). To smear our justice system just to keep one of the must unjust symbols of America in business is embarrassing and shameful.
Rather than work on delivering justice, they're concerned about appearances. Appearing to be tough. Appearing to care about our security -- even though critics from Gen. David Patreaus to Gen. Colin Powell have said that Gitmo makes us less safe. That it's a recruiting tool for terrorists. And it's a lot easier to drudge up that old strawman of "activist judges," when the truth isn't on your side. When 195 terrorists have been tried and convicted here since 9/11. When trying terrorists on American soil and imprisoning them is a "been there, done that" situation.
That's why the photo (pictured above) stood out to me. That we believe in an America that would close Guantanamo Bay. We believe in the America President Obama was talking about in his speech to the Nobel committee. That we believe in an America that is strong, secure and stands up for its principles, that doesn't shutter them or abandon them the minute things get tough. We're better than that and we're stronger than that and our institutions are worthy of our support -- not our ridicule.
The non-believers should be ashamed. But we know they're not. It's not about protecting America or doing the right thing. It's about political gamesmanship and fear. That's not the America we believe in.
This story was originally posted at New Security Action.
Flickr/Sayan51: Found on The American Prospect's Tapped blog:
A sign outside of a Church in Greenwich, New York, in April, 2008. While the Obama administration pledged to close Guantanamo Bay Prison by January of 2010, it has since said it would miss the deadline.