Stealth Appeasement?

Awhile back, at the height of the Gitmo Koran(imal) Abuse scandal, I said the following.

Unless Bush dramatically changes course from evasion and appeasement to standing his ground, I predict that Gitmo will close by year's end or that there will be a firm plan in place to do so. If and when that occurs, the left will find something else to attack Bush for. That's what you get when you try to satisfy someone who has already decided that no matter what you do, you are not good enough. The correct answer, George, is to ignore such people after first explaining to those who are open to reason what you stand for and why you are ignoring the ridiculous accusations of the media moonbats.

Since then, we have seen refusals to close Gitmo by the Bush Administration. These refusals were curiously unbolstered with a strong case for the right of our nation to operate such a prison during a time of war. Then the story died down. I was cautiously optimistic that perhaps Bush had outfoxed Amnesty International et al. by weathering the storm. Far from perfect, but at least he didn't cave.

No. I do not use hallucinogens, but even that warily optimistic assessment may have been wrong. Has the die-down of the Gitmo media storm relieved the Bush administration of the need to appear resolute? This is one possible interpretation of the fact that plans are now in place to transfer most of the prisoners out of Gitmo.

The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.

U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, ambassador at large for war crimes, who led a U.S. delegation to the Middle East this week, said similar agreements are being pursued with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, whose nationals make up a significant percentage of the Guantanamo population. Prosper held talks in Saudi Arabia on Sunday and Monday, but negotiations were cut off after the announcement of King Fahd's death.

The decision to move more than 20 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo to Afghanistan and to largely clear out the detention center at Bagram is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce the population of "enemy combatants" in U.S. custody. Senior U.S. officials said yesterday's agreement is the first major step toward whittling down the Guantanamo population to a core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely.

Now this could be perfectly legitimate (more on that near the end of the article), but there's one problem: We're still at war. Speaking of reducing our population of enemy combatants is absurdly premature. Arguably, sending them to countries in the Middle East is also premature, especially in the case of Saudi Arabia, which faces political instability due to the age of its new king and due to its own terrorists. I could certainly see making room for new prisoners as a reason to cut down on the number of prisoners currently being held at Gitmo, but this looks more like an early move along the path to closure to me.

The lack of a strong argument by the Bushies on Gitmo in response to the earlier controversy thus does two things. First, it makes me leery of the actual intentions of the Bush Administration. Second, it does the same for Bush's pacifist opponents, who now smell fresh blood and who can be expected to immediately start raising cain again. This has already started.

"The Guantanamo issue is clearly a liability for the Bush administration, and emptying it has become a priority," said John Sifton, a specialist on Afghanistan and detainee issues at Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group. "It's not a victory for human rights if a whole set of people deprived of their liberty are then moved to another place and continued to be deprived of their liberty unlawfully."

And note what Sifton says at the end. Didn't I also say, "the left will find something else to attack Bush for"? No matter what Bush does, he will be criticized. If an idiot is going to criticize you, Mr. President, the best course is to see to it that he's "blaming" you for doing the right thing, and to make sure that everybody knows it. In this case, the "right thing" is for our country to hold any prisoners ourselves unless we are positive that sending them elsewhere won't be tantamount to releasing them.

Is Gitmo being flushed down the toilet of political expediency or is this a legitimate move? If Bush won't tell us himself, time will.

-- CAV