Obama’s Attorney General: If We’re Going To Close Gitmo, Europe Has To Take Some Detainees
And what do you think is going to happen to the detainees in Europe? Think they’re going to be put up in cushy cells with frequent visitors and monthly trips to the zoo? Or detained, perhaps, in a fashion not at all unlike the way they’re detained in Gitmo?
BERLIN – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spent days gingerly, privately asking for help before taking his plea public: The United States needs Europe’s assistance to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
In publicizing his appeal, Holder compared the effort to close Guantanamo to the historic alliances of the Cold War and the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain in this once-divided city.
“I know that Europe did not open Guantanamo, and that in fact a great many on this continent opposed it,” Holder said in a speech Wednesday night. “To close Guantanamo, we must all make sacrifices and we must all be willing to make unpopular choices.”
International outrage over Gitmo has never been about the treatment of the prisoners there (which, contrary to political dogma, has been exemplary) but rather about an easy issue with which to bash America. If prisoner detention were something the international community was actually all that concerned about they’d be taking countries like China and Cuba and Iran to task. But they don’t, really, outside of the most cursory and routine of condemnations. Instead, it’s America that’s the target.
This is about America-bashing, pure and simple. And Obama’s big plans to fix the situation is to just acknowledge that all the haters out there are right.
Update: On a related note, there’s a town in Montana that would love to have the Gitmo detainees shipped there.
