Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who emerged in 2009 as the chief apologist for the worst of the Bush-era national-security policies, gloats about the prospects for closing Guantanamo:
Cheney also asserted that Obama has learned that the prison at Guantanamo Bay simply cannot be closed, despite the promises he made while campaigning for the White House.
"I think he's learned that he's not going to be able to close Guantanamo," Cheney said. "That it's — if you didn't have it, you'd have to create one like that. You've got to have some place to put terrorists who are combatants who are bound and determined to try to kill Americans."
Cheney, of course, played an important role in helping to solidify conservative opposition to closing Gitmo, but he hardly deserves all the credit. He shares that responsibility with a skittish Democratic Congress and an administration more concerned with symbolic gestures than the hard-nosed politics it would have taken to succeed.
Moreover, it's hard to disagree with Cheney on the substance of what the administration is thinking. He's absolutely right that, given the administration's decision to embrace indefinite detention, what would have replaced Gitmo was a "place like that," in the sense of a place to put people the administration had no intention of trying or releasing. That's why so many civil-liberties groups opposed the creation of a "Gitmo North" as long as indefinite detention was retained as policy.
Perhaps what's most satisfying for Cheney, though, is the notion that Obama had "learned" something about how essential Gitmo is for American national-security policy that he didn't understand as a candidate. That's nonsense -- even Cheney's former boss and Gen. David Petraeus said they wanted to close Gitmo. What's clear is that Obama didn't treat closing Gitmo as a serious national-security goal -- or he would never have acquiesced to the limits Congress placed on his ability to try terrorist suspects in federal court. If he truly believed that the recently passed ban on DoD funds for Gitmo transfers "undermines our Nation's counterterrorism efforts and has the potential to harm our national security," he would have done more in his signing statement than simply promising rather abstractly to "fight" the ban in the future. The administration has undermined the urgency of its own narrative precisely because it's been afraid to fight battles fraught with political peril where it could avoid them.
Gitmo's ongoing existence is due to politics -- not due to the fact that it makes Americans safer than they would be otherwise. The opposite is true. But the winners get to write history, and the torture wing of the Republican Party seems to have won this battle decisively.
