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I am not a card-carrying member of the ACLU. I do not believe that the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights are absolute. I’ve even been known to tell telephone solicitors for the NRA who invoke the second amendment, that their ilk are members of one of the top ten evil organizations in the country (in language not nearly so polite). So my position on closing Guantanamo is not totally an outgrowth of a commitment to an abstract argument about individual rights.
Rather, it is about the need of the citizens of our nation to accept a measure of insecurity as inherent in human life. Once that concept is accepted, the Guantanamo issue does not become one of ensuring that everyone incarcerated there receives a speedy and fair trial. Nor does it become one of ensuring that every American is free from the risk of a terrorist attack. My position, in contrast, grows in part out of a calculation of what course is likely, in a broad sense, to reduce the inherent insecurity of the people of the United States. The problem with maintaining Guantanamo as a holding place for prisoners, in this context, is not that it will perpetuate a deviation from an absolute conception of individual rights, but that it will continue to undermine, broadly, the moral standing of the United States in the world and provide a recruitment tool for terrorists hostile to our country. Those liabilities undermine our overall ability to counter terrorism and thus render Americans more susceptible to hostile action, whether at home or abroad.
In other words, our country has a choice between risking the consequences of bringing some potential terrorists to its homeland, even if in most cases they are incarcerated, and holding them idefinitely in circumstances in which its moral authority is undermined and terrorist operatives contiue to recruit in part through the image of the United States that Guantanamo promotes. Neither choice offers absolute security nor an assurance of overall success in the struggle against terror directed at the United States. However, one choice offers a better bet, in the larger scheme of things, to reduce the dangers presented by terrorism–and that is to close Guantanamo sooner rather than later.
Former Vice President Cheney deserves a continuing voice, but he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt simply because, on his watch, the United States dodged a second 9/11. His argument for the pursuit of absolute security is the wrong strategy not primarily because it is repulsive in a democratic society, but because it is unlikely to result in achievement of the closest approximation of its objective.
On terrorism, America’s interests lie in the “sensible center” rather than in the extremes of the ACLU or the NRA.
Tags: Cheney, guantanamo
William Stueck
William Stueck is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia. He is currently writing a history of U.S.-Korean relations. He is the author of, among other works, Rethinking the Korean War (Princeton University P, 2002) and The Korean War: An International History (Princeton U, 1995).