The Politics of the Gitmo Debate

[gilliam]

Via Gerry Daly and Ankle Biting Pundits, here are the latest poll numbers on how Americans view the Bush administration’s operation of Guantanamo Bay:

• As you may know, since 2001, the United States has held people from other countries who are suspected of being terrorists at a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Based on what you have heard or read, do you think the US should continue to operate this facility or do you think the US should close this facility and transfer the prisoners to other facilities? Continue to operate: 58
  Close facility: 36
  No opinion: 6
• In general, do you approve or disapprove of the way the US is treating the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba?

Approve: 52
Disapprove: 37
No opinion: 11

• Do you approve/disapprove strongly, or not strongly?

Approve, strongly: 33
Approve, not strongly: 19
Disapprove, not strongly: 14
Disapprove, strongly: 23
No opinion: 11

Keep doing what you’re doing, Gitmo-bashers. It’s working wonders.

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Reader feedback…

Robert C. writes: “The missing question is the one in which they determine if disapproval comes from feeling the treatment is too kind.”

Yes.

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Update: The White House has rejected the idea of a commission to investigate alleged detainee abuse.

The White House on Tuesday rejected the proposed creation of an independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees held at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has launched 10 major investigations into allegations of abuse, and that system was working well. “People are being held to account,” he said. “And we think that’s the way to go about this.”

Agreed.

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Related:

The politics of the Gitmo debate

hat tip

 

[HagiaSophia]

From Michelle Malkin:

"…And now, the facts:
Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three-dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as “enemy combatants” is based.

Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration’s failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, “the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the ‘Article V’ hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case.”
Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters – with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial – is a surefire recipe for another 9-11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system – long established in wartime – in the first place.

The few critics who acknowledge the existence of the tribunals argue they aren’t sufficient. They “provided due process in form, but not in substance,” as Newsday put it. That view is shared by a Carter-appointed liberal judge, but an earlier decision by a Bush-appointed judge upheld the tribunals. In the end, courts will almost certainly affirm the legality of the Gitmo tribunals, which, as noted, were modeled after the due-process standards described in the Hamdi decision."

That ruling, may I remind you, addressed the detention of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. As former Attorney General William Barr noted last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Obviously, if these procedures are sufficient for American citizens, they are more than enough for foreign detainees.”

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