In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has an article on Guantánamo that tries very hard to sound even-handed, pumping only slightly for a proposal from Georgetown law professor and former Clinton Administration official Neal Katyal and Harvard law professor and former Bush Administration official Jack Goldsmith, which “is attracting a great deal of attention in the small world of national-security law”—New Yorker-speak for “these are the guys you should listen to.”
I’m less than impressed by Toobin’s even-handedness. Here’s how he describes the single adjudication to come out of Guantánamo so far:
“Administration officials hope that the military commissions will change Guantánamo’s reputation, but that seems unlikely. To date, the commissions have been an abject failure; in more than six years, they have adjudicated just one case—a plea bargain for David Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner from Australia. In March, 2007, after more than five years in custody, he pleaded guilty to “material support to terrorism,” and was sentenced to nine months; he was returned to Australia, where he served out his sentence, and has now been released.”
Pretty harsh, huh? Well, not really. In fact, the Hicks case was rammed through by Vice President Cheney as a favor to then Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who was taking a massive political beating over Hicks’ incarceration—a sample of how the military commissions would operate.
I’m not terribly excited by Goldsmith either, even though he did out John Yoo’s “the president is god” memo. Goldsmith is against the military commissions, which sounds like a mighty improvement, but he also has a hankering for something called “nontrial detention,” which frankly doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.*
Everyone arguing for some sort of “lower” standard does so on the grounds that we are holding people whom we “know” are guilty; we just need to figure out a legal proceeding with standards low enough to convict them. In other words, how do you design a kangaroo court that doesn’t look like, you know, a kangaroo court? The “legal discussion” here is 90% ass-covering by the Bush Administration. Their real goal, at this point, as with the “War on Terror” in general, is to delay any decisions until they’re out of office. If McCain is in, then whatever happens is his responsibility. If Hillary or Obama, then it’s all their fault.
The shocking fact is, al-Qaeda is simply not much of a threat to the U.S. The right wing is inflating the War on Terror in the same manner as the left inflated the “War on Tobacco.” It’s almost enough to make one nostalgic for Joe Camel.
*Goldsmith is also in favor of full immunity for the telecommunications companies, apparently on the grounds that people should break the law whenever the President tells them to, and is addicted to analogies between the “War on Terror” and World War II, earnestly trying to deceive Americans into believing that a few thousand fanatics are as dangerous as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan combined.
