WITH US President Barack Obama due to ask Kevin Rudd to commit more Australian troops to Afghanistan, it’s time to consider whether there are too many civil liberties.
In the simple land of moral absolutes inhabited by so many progressives and civil libertarians, just about everything that George W. Bush did in his fight against terrorism was wrong. For these people, the election of Obama would recalibrate the balance between national security and civil liberties so that America could again hold its head high. Human Rights First said Obama’s decision to shut down Guantanamo Bay would “restore the moral authority and strengthen the national security of the US”.
In the more complicated real world, even the man they openly call their messiah is disappointing them, given that naive absolutism is not only misconceived but downright dangerous.
Detaining men at Guantanamo Bay was absolutely wrong, declared the anti-Bushies. Obama agreed, two days into his presidency signing an executive order to close down Gitmo. Last week we learned that Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, the Taliban’s new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan, was a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner released to the Afghan Government in December 2007. Now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, he’s commanding areas where the violence has been ramped up in recent months.
In January it was reported that another former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, Said Ali al-Shihri, had emerged as deputy leader of the al-Qa’ida network in Yemen.
According to US officials, al-Shihri, allegedly involved in the bombing of the US embassy in Sana’a last year, and released from Gitmo in 2007, was handed over to the Saudi Government and entered a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists. Nice idea. Didn’t work. It turns out you can count on the Taliban and al-Qa’ida to spot the real talent.
There’s not a whiff of branch stacking, no insertion of party hacks when they choose their jihadist leaders. Instead, it’s all about merit. That sees the likes of Rasoul and al-Shihri taking up a leadership role to impose a warped Islamist ideology on large swaths of the globe.
Gitmo was not the perfect solution. These terrorists were released under the watch of the Bush administration because it’s not easy identifying terrorists. But closing down Gitmo won’t make identifying terrorists any easier.
Indeed, that dilemma has just been made harder by Obama’s promise to try to return more detainees to their home countries.
Quaint notions of rehabilitation programs no doubt stroke liberal sensibilities. Yemen, the home of the single biggest group among the 250 Gitmo detainees has, with Western backing, set up Saudi-like “edification programs based on moderation to shun extremism and terrorism”.
Another nice idea. But al-Shihri’s promotion up the al-Qa’ida ladder shows that releasing many of these men back to Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, undercuts not only the national security of the US but the safety of every citizen in every country targeted by terrorists. And that list grows longer by the day.
It takes a sweet but rather dim-witted Pollyanna view of the world to suppose that men infused with an ideology to kill infidels and trained to do so need only spend some time in the equivalent of a detox centre to get those dirty jihadist thoughts out of their minds. These guys don’t have a drinking or drug problem. They have a killing problem.
But in a society where we think we can treat every transgression, from swearing to homophobic language, with a stint in rehab, it’s no great surprise that we now think terrorists are just miscreants of a slightly nastier kind.
This has always been the liberal mindset. Terrorists, we were told, ought to be treated and prosecuted as criminals in ordinary courts, because we can’t really be at war with a transnational group of religious nutters. The obsession with simple moral absolutes meant that denying habeas corpus rights to alleged terrorists caught on the battlefield was equally wrong. Liberal justices in the US Supreme Court agreed, leading Chief Justice John Roberts to declare, in dissent, that the American people had just lost “a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges”. Soldiers would henceforth have to collect evidence and take witness statements from the battlefield like a cop busting a drug ring. As Justice Antonin Scalia said in his dissent, “how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about national security”.
Then it was military commissions. They too were wrong, said the civil libertarians. Not even the US Supreme Court agreed on this one.
Rendition was apparently the greatest wrong. Secret abductions and holing up prisoners in other countries signalled that Bush’s America had truly lost its moral compass. In fact, rendition was used under the Clinton administration. Moreover, Obama’s executive order closing down secret CIA sites made it clear previous rendition practices would not end. In small print, the order said that the sites closed down “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory nature”. Even Obama apparently wants, or needs, some wriggle room on rendition.
Present and former US intelligence officials have said that rendition may now play a greater role as one of the few remaining tools to get suspected terrorists off the streets. “Obviously you need to preserve some tools: you still have to go after the bad guys,” said one Obama administration official.
And that’s the point. Gitmo may be closed. Habeas corpus rights are back. But consider this. Our soldiers may now confront more released Gitmo detainees duly promoted up the jihadist ladder on the battlefield. And what was inaccurately regarded as the worst symbol of the Bush era - rendition - may end up becoming a more widely used tool for those enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan. Happily, all done far away from the eyes of those who still see the US President as their liberal saviour.
There is no perfect, settled place to draw the line between civil liberties and national security. But those who speak in terms of moral absolutes are as dangerous as they are naive. This is not an abstract academic argument about liberal values and national security. It cuts to the core of how we protect ourselves from Islamists who waged war against us long before we noticed. The danger is that a complacent liberalism will endanger our troops and signal to the enemy that we do not have the stomach for war any more.
