Congress is apparently going to give al Qaeda and other jihadists who want to kill Americans at least two more years of their most potent recruitment tool: the Guantanamo Bay prison.
According to a front page story in the New York Times, Obama administration officials now believe that Congressional opposition to the president's directive to close Guantanamo is going to force the administration to keep it open "until 2011 at the earliest".
How is Congress keeping Gitmo open and al Qaeda recruiters happy? By flexing its Constitutional power of the purse. The federal Bureau of Prisons does not have the $150 million to make the necessary upgrades to the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois that the Obama administration wants to use to house some of the Gitmo prisoners. Congressional appropriators are making it clear that they have no intention of providing the administration the funding it needs for Thomson. So Gitmo has a new lease on life.
General Colin Powell and many other respected military leaders support the immediate closing of Gitmo for a reason - it hurts national security and undermines the men and women in uniform who are in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan. General Powell says that if it were up to him he would not wait until tomorrow, he'd close it this afternoon.
But, Washington being what it is, politicians find it difficult to avoid the temptation to play politics, even when the price of their gamesmanship is the lives of American troops.
The bitter irony, of course, is that these very same politicians are the ones who scream the loudest on the floor of the House and Senate to demand that Congress support the troops. They also were the most vehement about opposing any conditions on spending when it comes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet now that Congress has the opportunity to make a bold statement to the world about what the United States stands for by closing Gitmo and ending the torture it has come to symbolize, they'd rather play games. That new page that President Obama declared the United States would be turning? The new day that was dawning? Never mind. Congress wants the world to know that, notwithstanding the president's lofty rhetoric, America is not the country he claims it to be.
The political obstacles President Obama faces include Congressional Democrats who have apparently decided that the 32 times that al Qaeda has explicitly used Gitmo as a point of attack against the United States in its filmed recruitment appeals (four times this year alone) doesn't matter.
No one knows more about the damage Guantanamo does to our national security than former senior military interrogator Matt Alexander, who literally wrote the book on interrogating terrorist suspects, has conducted more than 300 interrogations himself and supervised 1,000 more. As Matt has made clear over and over and over again: "Guantanamo Bay remains an effective recruiting tool for Al Qaida to this day. The longer it remains open, the longer we'll fail to do all we can to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks. It is the epitome of everything we could have done wrong in the fight against Islamic extremism -- unlawful detentions without charge and torture and abuse. We can only defeat ourselves in this battle, and Guantanamo Bay was, and remains, a big step in that direction."
The fact is, the United States is more than capable of safely and securely housing foreign and domestic terrorists. We already have 340 terrorists locked up in federal prisons right now. The willingness of some Democrats in Congress to join their Republican colleagues in undermining our national security by playing politics with Guantanamo is an outrage, and nothing more than "exaggerated, not-in-my-backyard objections." If Congress really wants to protect our troops and keep America safe they should act to close Guantanamo now.
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Cross-posted at http://newsecurityaction.org/blog