Marc Thiessen has unsurprisingly joined the chorus of Republicans calling for Gitmo to take in new detainees now that Congress has all but doomed Obama's promise to close the facility. Ben Wittes points out that the most immediate result of doing so would be to make high-value detainees subject to judicial review, which torture afficionado Thiessen presumably wouldn't like.
Like House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon a few weeks ago, Thiessen seems to think Guantanamo is simply surplus detention space. It’s not. It’s surplus detention space with habeas. Bringing people there thus involves a decision to grant them a measure of judicial review that they don’t get anywhere else. I think this is a good idea for certain categories of long-term detainees, including certainly the high-value detainees with which he is concerned here. But it would be a fateful and complicated step, not simply–as Thiessen suggests–a climb-down for the administration, but also an affirmative decision to submit to a degree of judicial scrutiny above and beyond what is strictly speaking necessary under current law. Does Thiessen really want that? And for whom?
Everyone seems to have forgotten that the whole point of Gitmo was to avoid judicial scrutiny, to place detainees in a legal black hole beyond the reach of U.S. courts. The Bush administration didn't send people to Gitmo just because they were worried about terrorists escaping into the countryside and vaporizing Americans with Muslim Heat Vision. After the Boumediene decision granted habeas rights to detainees at Guantanamo, the detention camp became useless for that purpose. That's why even President George W. Bush expressed a desire to shut the place down -- there wasn't any real reason to keep it open anymore.
Closing it down would have denied terrorist recruiters a potent symbol of American lawlessness in the war on terror, but Gitmo as a symbol is now almost as meaningful to Republicans. For Thiessen and other conservatives, keeping Gitmo open is a way to vindicate President Bush in the eyes of history, of absolving his administration of wrongdoing by preserving the most prominent institutional artifacts of his "war on terror." It's a sign of how deeply committed they are to that task above all else that they're willing to "grant terrorists constitutional rights" in the process, having spent the last two years rending their clothing and yelling their throats raw at the prospect.
