By Dale McFeatters
President Barack Obama took office on a pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison; incarcerate its detainees on the U.S. mainland; abandon the military commissions and try them in civilian courts; and end the George W. Bush-era policy of indefinite detention without trial.
On Monday, while denying he was doing so, Obama issued an executive order that takes the fates of the detainees back to where they were at the end of the Bush administration.
Guantanamo Bay will remain open for the foreseeable future, a blight on our reputation and a rallying cry for our enemies. Congress has blocked bringing the detainees to the United States on the fanciful grounds that they might escape and terrorize the surrounding communities, even though some of those communities wanted the detainees and the jobs their prisons would bring. And no one, it was pointed out at the time, has ever escaped from a federal "super max" prison.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, was to have been tried in Manhattan, but the president backed off that plan in the face of intense opposition. That means Mohammed likely will face a military commission of the kind Obama suspended two years ago.
On Monday, pursuant to the president's order, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lifted the January 2009 ban on new trials by military commissions. Ever since Bush originally proposed the military tribunals, hopelessly weighted in favor of the prosecution, they have been under almost constant revision to achieve some semblance of fairness. Gates retained the option of civilian trials, but, with the House in Republican hands, it's doubtful Congress would allow it.
Assuming Obama doesn't change his mind again, about 80 of the 172 remaining detainees will be tried by the commissions. In another holdover from the Bush administration, even if detainees are found innocent the government is under no obligation to release them.
Obama faced another Bush-era dilemma: what to do with the 48 or so detainees deemed too dangerous to be repatriated or released in a third country but who can't be conventionally tried because of national-security considerations or problems with evidence.
His solution was the same as his predecessor's: indefinite detention, even for life, without trial. Obama aides say their plan is different in this respect: Each detainee will go before a Periodic Review Board, composed of Pentagon, intelligence, State, Justice and Homeland Security officials, within the year for a status review and then every three years thereafter. The detainees will also receive a less formal "paper review" every six months.
Like Bush, Obama has settled on a detention system that will satisfy no one and is jarringly at odds with American ideals of legal fairness.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).
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