Obama Says Guantanamo Will Not Be Closed By His Own Deadline

Andy Worthington reports after his USA tour…

I thought it was time to pay another visit to the country whose cruel, lawless and counter-productive approach to warfare and countering terrorism has dominated my life for the last four years, and this desire (which, I freely admit, also included plans to hook up with, and in some cases to meet for the first time, good friends I have made through the Internet) was also driven by the realization that, with just two months until President Obama’s deadline for closing Guantánamo, the prison will not be closed on time. Moreover, numerous cleared prisoners – cleared for release both by military review boards under the Bush administration, and by Obama’s own Task Force – may remain at Guantánamo for the rest of their lives unless the Senate’s ban on bringing cleared prisoners to the US mainland is overturned.

However, what I was not entirely prepared for was the extent to which these stories are either unknown or unacknowledged because of what I came to call “the Obama effect,” a belief, amongst many on the left, that Obama had waved a magic wand and made everything better, so that Americans could look in the mirror and feel good about themselves again, even though the political reality is actually far more complicated, and involves the difficulty of effecting any meaningful change given the general intransigence of Congress, and hidden pressure behind the scenes from other actors, including the Pentagon and the intelligence services, compounded by the administration’s frequent inability to act decisively.

The America I encountered this time, then, was in some ways suffering more than in March 2008, with the recession biting hard, the GOP apparently rabid, and the sheen on Obama’s halo slowly giving way to a realization, on the left, that, even with the best intentions, he cannot be a savior for the United States, and that, in any case, the best intentions are rarely enough to win over the lawmakers in Congress, dissenters in his own party, and, very possibly, the wayward might of the military-industrial complex.

As a result it was a fascinating, if sometimes frustrating time to visit, as activists attempt to build up a base of supporters again, struggling even to engage anti-war protestors, who seem to have overlooked the fact that, even on the campaign trail, Obama’s trade-off for scaling down operations in Iraq was to promise an increase in military action in Afghanistan, and everyone on the left (and, presumably, in the center) tries to decipher the administration’s intentions, and the meanings of its actions.