To the Editor:
Re “The Guantánamo Papers” (editorial, April 26): You say the newly released documents from Guantánamo prison serve as “a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there,” and show “the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence” of the Bush administration’s handling of terror detainees.
This assessment is devoid of its proper context. The period after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, was indeed chaotic and fraught with desperate efforts to get a handle on the nature of the threat we were facing. The Bush administration had to urgently juggle the twin challenges of preventing another major attack (which was deemed a near certainty) while creating new mechanisms for dealing with an entirely new category of wartime combatants.
In retrospect, it is easy to criticize the Bush administration’s post-9/11 detainee policies. And much of the criticism is certainly justified.
But the fact that President Obama, despite all of his promises to the contrary, has maintained nearly all of the Bush administration’s detainee policies shows the perilous complexity of these issues—nearly 10 years later.
STUART GOTTLIEB
New York, April 26, 2011
The writer teaches American foreign policy and counterterrorism at Columbia and Yale, and served as a foreign policy adviser in the Senate from 1999 to 2003.
Note from KBJ: Context? Since when do progressives care about context? They pay lip service to context, complexity, and nuance, but don't care about these things when they stand in the way of progressive ends.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 