Obama needs a next step

A recession rears and, with it, a homelier head, that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man of ill repute and wild hair. He is remembered for an image of him – looking like he’d awakened from a three-day bender – published from his capture in 2003. He is better remembered as the mastermind of that disturbing event known as 9/11, an endeavor that helped him gain admission to a new home at Guantanamo Bay. So what to do with him now?

Momentum to close Guantanamo having coursed to pulsing gusher, backers of that move – including the next president – have raced headlong into a wall of hard logic. It is one thing to insist on prosecuting figures such as Mohammed in federal court rather than at military tribunals, but another to ensconce them in mainland prisons rather than on an isle 90 miles off the Florida coast. Neighbors may vex, but none quite in the manner of fellows fond of watching 100 stories of steel and concrete collapse to rubble with thousands of innocents inside.

It is so bad as all this: Leftists, who have pounded the drum against Guantanamo with the frenzy of heavy-metal percussionists, now are fretting over the implications, which, apparently, had not heretofore been contemplated. “I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institute said.

Well, yes, that might be a problem. Finding places for terrorist suspects to cool their heels while awaiting federal trial will be sufficiently difficult. More so is the dilemma of where they might go next if the courts release them. What if there is evidence of a threat, for example, but not enough to convict? Does this send allies of Mohammed into the streets of, say, New York or Los Angeles? These are questions Barack Obama must answer once he migrates from Chicago’s political mire to Washington’s. He has pledged to shutter Guantanamo, but has left unresolved the matter of what next.

This leaves Obama to determine whether he will recognize distinctions between prisoners held in Cuba and those held elsewhere. In the case of the former, the accusations are of crimes against the United States, what some – including the prisoners themselves – might call acts of war. In the case of the latter, the accusations, generally, involve domestic crimes without international dimensions. There is a difference between enemy combatants and domestic criminals.

Obama’s staff is giving indications that give us some hope that, once blind, perhaps now he sees. This includes creating a separate judicial system for especially sensitive cases and advancing a new law on preventive detention. His staffers even have expressed a willingness to consider allowing the CIA to “use techniques not approved by the military,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which means some form of interrogation might continue.

Still, the larger question of what to do about Guantanamo needs to be resolved, and soon. Some 250 souls, some of them clearly dark, reside there. They will surely fight bitterly in courtrooms to regain their freedom, some with the explicit purpose of utilizing that liberty to wage a still more bitter fight against the American people.

In abandoning military tribunals – as our leaders are determined to do – and according American rights to people accused of being enemy combatants, some of them surely jihadists in the purest sense of the term, our country has taken what strikes us as an uncalculated risk with the lives of its citizens.

Shuttering Guantanamo and shipping detainees onto US soil swells that risk to the point of bursting. Playing into the hands of enemies invites a slap from reality. Obama should consider this and leave the detainees to await justice on the bay.