More Partisanship Over Guantanamo Closure

Congressional Republicans are reportedly rushing to condemn the White House’s alleged consideration of ways to close Guantanamo and move detainees to the United States despite legislative prohibitions.   Senator Pat Roberts has vowed to “shut down the Senate” if the President tries to bring Guantanamo detainees to the United States (Fort Leavenworth is in his home state of Kansas) and Speaker John Boehner has challenged Democrats to “make their position known” whether they support “the President’s maneuver to override a bipartisan law” or “stand with the American people and oppose this dangerous plan.” This is just the latest salvo in the long-running partisan battle over Guantanamo closure. As I have explained in the past, President Obama has fanned the political flames by calling Guantanamo “a facility that should never have been opened” and by announcing the Bergdahl-Taliban swap in a Rose Garden press conference. It’s therefore no surprise that he elicits hyberbolic reactions from Congressional Republicans, especially three weeks from the mid-term elections, when he continually inserts politics into a vexing national security problem. While not surprising, the responsive politicization of Guantanamo by Congressional Republicans is similarly unfortunate.  Republicans should recall that President Bush also wanted to close Guantanamo because he considered the prison to be “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies.” (Decision Points, p. 180)   He returned more than 525 detainees from Guantanamo to other countries, and Bush Administration officials also developed plans to close Guantanamo and transfer the remaining detainees to prisons in the United States (but prior to legislation prohibiting such transfers). It is appropriate for Republicans to question how the President could transfer detainees to the United States in the face of  legislative restrictions.  But rather than condemning the President's plans to close Guantanamo altogether, Congressional Republicans would do better to offer (publicly, not just privately) to work with the President to close Guantanamo in a responsible way, including by transferring a small number of detainees (including any convicted by military commission) to maximum-security prisons in the United States.