Obama’s Guantánamo dilemma

By giving his most detailed speech so far on terrorist detainees on Thursday, Barack Obama was hoping to persuade others to drop the subject.

Unfortunately for Mr Obama, who wants to direct the conversation to more forward-looking topics, such as healthcare reform and a possible Arab-Israeli peace process, the turmoil surrounding treatment of alleged terrorists is likely to persist.

That is partly because he has adopted a messy position himself. On the one hand Mr Obama has said he will close the Guantánamo detention centre by next January. On the other, his administration continues to use George W. Bush’s definition of the “war on terror” to detain the most dangerous ones indefinitely – just not on Cuban soil, or American, if Congress continues to get its way.

Mr Obama is unlikely to get much help from his Democratic colleagues. From the left, he faces a growing cry of betrayal. His decision to “look forward, not back” means that the Bush lawyers who drafted the memos reclassifying torture as legal are unlikely to be prosecuted.

Nor does Mr Obama want to set up a “truth commission” to investigate post 9/11 torture. Such a move might put the politics on ice for a few months. Then it would return squared. Mr Obama would be faced with a dilemma: choose again to “look forward” and be branded a traitor to the high ideals on which he campaigned; or prosecute those found culpable and risk igniting a real backlash against his presidency.

It is worth remembering that half the American people believe “waterboarding” is justified, according to polls – a far higher number than those who do not. A small majority also believe it is wrong to close Guantánamo. These are not diehard conservatives. Many are Democrats.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Mr Obama is getting little help from centrist colleagues. Last week, almost all Democrats joined their Republican counterparts in the Senate to vote down an $80m (€57m, £50m) appropriation to pay for the closure of Gitmo. They argued that it was wrong to close the facility before a policy had been devised to rehouse its 240 detainees.

This is understandable. Mr Obama made an error in announcing the closure before he had devised a new policy. But their real motive was more prosaic. Democrats don’t want alleged terrorists to set foot on American soil. And they will not permit reason to get in the way of a good argument.

No prisoner has ever escaped a federal “supermax” prison. Even if it were a possibility, it would surely be less frightening to have a terrorist suspect escape into your community than a convicted paedophile or psychopath. The latter two would know how to blend in. More importantly, America will have little chance of persuading other countries to take some of the Gitmo detainees if it refuses to take any itself.

All of which makes Dick Cheney’s increasingly bitter interventions fairly useful for Mr Obama. Leaving aside the suspicion that his real target is Mr Bush, who put an end to most “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2004, Mr Cheney’s stridency has served to blunt much of the disillusion felt by Mr Obama’s liberal friends.

It also focuses attention on the fact that the shrinking Republican party is letting Mr Cheney stand in as its leader. Since Mr Cheney has had much to do with why it is shrinking, this can hardly be a bad thing for Mr Obama. Mr Cheney has asked for information about the results of the interrogations to be declassified. Mr Obama should comply.

That way we could establish the accuracy of allegations, by two intelligence officers, that Mr Cheney and others pushed for the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah in the forlorn hope of turning up evidence linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

The timing fits the build-up to the Iraq war. The first was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. The second 83 times in August 2002.

“They were legal, justified, essential and entirely the right thing to do,” Mr Cheney said.

Mr Obama should let the facts speak for themselves. Did these two waterboardees tell interrogators what they wanted to hear? And what was that precisely? If Mr Obama cannot change the conversation, then he should send it back to where it belongs.