Obama’s first Guantanamo Challenge – Opportunity or Foreign Policy Disaster?
When you follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, and even draw inspiration from his 1863 speech about not compromising liberty for the sake of security, then there comes a time when your words and prophetic messages have to translate into reality. The alternative is nothing but a recipe for stirring cynicism and ridicule for not only blowing smoke up people’s asses, but for illustrating to a world looking up to you for a new type of leadership, that at best, you’re full of bullshit, and at worst, you’re just like any other politician who lied his ass off to get elected. What’s new, I hear your sarcastic self mumble….
Barrack Obama had probably plotted his first 100 days in office with clinical precision and an anticipation of some teething problems, giving him enough time and wind in his sails to focus on the US economy and the debris in Iraq and Afghanistan that Eagle 43 left in the Oval office in-tray on his way to a leafy suburb of North Dallas. As regular as clockwork, the executive orders rolled out in the first few days to show the world that Eagle 44 was a man of substance who was serious about meeting policy change promises made during his campaign, not least the closure of the torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay.
But just like conventional wisdom would suggest, well laid plans get blindsided like a nonsense, and there’s really nothing you can do about that. Granted, Obama’s team rightly anticipated that closing Guantanamo bay is going to be more than a project, but I doubt if they expected their first live grenade with it to be a one 30 year old Binyam Mohammed from Ethiopia.
Binyam Mohammed who claims he was tortured in Guantanamo bay
See, in 2004 someone decided to lock up Binyam in Guantanamo bay and throw away the key. This was after flying him around on renditions to places like Morocco and Pakistan, and torturing him for 18 months. In an effort to limit the reputational damage that the US has suffered, they supposedly extended him the courtesy of a full and fair trial, though they didn’t anticipate the enthusiasm of Binyam’s pro bono lawyers from the UK.
As he is a UK resident, his lawyers have successfully made a claim at the high court in the UK that his confessions were extracted under extreme torture, and he did what any person who had no option would do – confess so that the pain and anguish would stop. He describes some of what they put him through including being regularly hang from ceilings, his genitals and chest being sliced by surgical instruments, and hot liquid being poured into the wounds.
The charge put to him is that he allegedly trained with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in preparation to carry out terrorist attacks in the UK. One problem now posed by the success of his legal team to have the accounts of torture heard by 2 justices of the high court, is that the accounts provided by American interrogators having been recognized as torture by the court, are now admissible. Which means that they fall into the public domain and the ‘Freedom of Information’ hawks from the press and the civil liberties groups are hovering around like a vulture would over a carcass of a wildebeest slain in the Maasai Mara.
Binyam’s defence is straight forward – “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time”. But that’s not the crux of this piñata for Obama. The problem for Obama is that he has gone out of his way to wax lyrical about his disdain and intolerance of torture, and the fact that America must not choose between liberty and dignity, and their national security. This is clearly a blunt policy change from the neo-con hawk policies of Rumsfeld and Bush that condoned torture and sanctioned the US military’s unilateral desecration of article 3 of the Geneva convention.
The British government’s case is that the high court, whilst accepting the account of events in this case as a matter for the defence, must keep it out of the public domain for national security reasons. The Americans have issued an explicit threat that if this ‘torture’ information got out in the public domain, then the US will withhold intelligence from the UK, which is in itself an implicit threat to the security of UK citizens and residents. The court whilst agreeing to keep the info secret, did not hesitate to unleash a tirade of condemnations of how the British government had stooped so low, not only to be shafted yet again by the US, but to have the audacity to preach to the world about the virtues of democracy and liberty – yet British security services are clearly complicit in their view, to acts of torture. The government of course are denying this – but what choice do they have.
The questions for Obama then become very uncomfortable:
- Does his administration stand by the explicit threat (made by the Bush administration) of withholding intelligence if documents about the torture of Binyam – which have been accepted as facts to consider by the court – are released to the British public and the world?
- If not, why the hell did he lie to the world during his campaign and at his inauguration that he will change all policies and redress America’s position on torture?
- If he doesn’t change the position on that threat on the basis of “national security” – how does he expect people to take him seriously and even think that he was credible?
On the other hand, Obama has a massive opportunity to score a powerful and extremely loud early goal in foreign policy and signal to the world that things have changed and let the court release the details of the torture. Clearly, it will not only be politically embarrassing to the US and the UK, but it will further damage the reputation of both countries. He can get away with it by blaming Bush – but has he got the cojones to do it? The British are scared of asking him of his position.
