Wikileaks on Guantanamo Resettlement

Larkin and I were planning to post a detailed account of what the Wikileaks cables say about  Guantanamo resettlement efforts, but Charlie Savage and Andrew Lehren of the New York Times have beaten us to the punch with an excellent overview. I won't repeat the facts here, but a few thoughts are in order. The effort to close Guantanamo involves a complicated set of constraints that limit the options of the policymakers. For political reasons, policymakers can't free any detainees here at home. Prosecutors can't charge all that many of them with crimes, and even if they could, there are political and logistical constraints associated with both of the available trial forums. The administration can't send them home to countries likely to torture them. And it cannot lawfully hold those whom a habeas court deems outside of the detention power conferred by the AUMF beyond the time it takes to arrange repatriation or resettlement. These constraints, along with others, cumulatively put an enormous premium on diplomatic efforts to resettle certain detainees in countries not their own and that will not mistreat them but will keep an eye on them. It should therefore be no surprise whatsoever that the State Department has engaged in a certain amount of horsetrading with a wide range of different countries that may offer resettlement opportunities. That some of these countries are places of which most Americans have never heard (Can you find Kiribati on a map?) and that some of the specific horsetrading looks more than a little bit like bribery shows merely that the administration has been energetic in seeking out options and has played the cards it has in its hand to make those options viable. I would have been frankly disappointed if the cables revealed anything else. I would also have been surprised had the cables revealed anything other than utterly self-serving behavior on the part of our many counterterrism "partners" around the world. That said, the behavior of our interlocutors, as described in these cables, defies parody. It brings to mind the great 2003 Tom Toles cartoon depicting the "Coalition of the Billing." Saudi King Abdullah suggests implanting tracking devices in freed detainees, likening Guantanamo detainees to horses and falcons. Slovenia wants a meeting with Obama. Kiribati wants dinero. Yemen is so unreliable that its president can't even decide within a single conversation whether he will or won't conduct a rehabilitation effort or whether he will or won't hold repatriated detainees--and wants money too. The Kuwaitis publicly demand the return of their people and privately suggest we free them in Afghanistan so they can be killed. And, of course, the Western Europeans--having campaigned for the closure of Guantanamo for years--run for cover. That is what Western European countries do, after all.  The Norwegians, for example, courageously label resettlement “purely a U.S. responsibility.” Guess what, Norway? Some of us never doubted that ending detention, just like conducting detention, would be purely a U.S. responsibility. I loathe Wikileaks, and I have no brief for what they did here. I would not be surprised if these disclosures serve to complicate further Guantanamo diplomacy as countries become anxious that they will be publically humiliated for airing their true concerns and conditions in helping us out. That would be unfortuantely. But a big part of me, to be quite honest, is not altogether sorry to see this material displayed prominently in the New York Times. If it embarrasses who are behaving in monumentally hypocritical or in perfectly mercenary fashion, I'm not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over that. They should be embarrassed.