The beauty and appeal of Obama’s message during his campaign was that he promised change we could believe in. It was such a great rallying cry, and allowed people to get behind his push – I mean after President Bush, it seemed there was general afreement that America needed to change the way it did things.
Change, as people are beginning to realize, is ambiguous. Agreeing we all needed ot see American change for the better is one thing; deciding what needs to be changed first, and what the best way to change it may be is another story entirely.
This is what President Obama is facing now with the subject of Guantanamo Bay. Within his first 100 days, Obama declared he was closing Guantanamo in a year, and many of us felt that this festering wound In American foreign policy was going to be a mild scar. It was the right step on a path to new beginnings, but it is just scratching the surface of what issues Guantanamo really bring to the forefront: human rights violations.
The legal argument can become very complicated, but it boils down to this – the way in which detainees were treated in Guantanamo was against International Law due to the U.S. being a party to the UN Universal Declaraion of Human Rights and Convention on Torture, and because the practice of protecting human rights has been elevated to jus cogens status based on the practices of countries over time. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo may not have been against U.S. Law, because any international treaty or declaration has to come into U.S. Law in the form of properly signed and ratified treaty or through congressional legislation. There is ambiguity surrounding whether the president can make a policy that overrides current domestic law on treatment of international prisoners. (*See* Condi Rice and *See* Richard Nixon say if the President does it, then it is not illegal.)
Whether or not these actions at Guantanamo were human rights violations, the treatment of detainees definitely is an issue the Obama Administration is grappling with. The recent decision to not rule out the controversial military commissions in trying certain detainees has raised concerns of critics and human rights groups.
I say that this is a situation where the campaign promises has reached the hard truth that reality poses: there is a multitude of opinions on what that change should be on every issue. I can understand that the commissions have a negative connotation to them – however, I am inclined to trust their feasibility, based on the precedent Obama has set in pragmatically weighing other foreign policy decisions. While I admit the improvements to the tribunals do not seem to be much of an adddition beyond what the Military Commissions Act of 2006 did, I do believe that the willingness of Obama to transfer some of the cases to a federal court shows that he is using military tribunals as the option – not as the evasive solution it was under Bush.
Obama has vowed to close Guantanamo; he has made promises to use the federal judicial process as a means to ensure due process; he is focusing on improving the due process in the military tribunals…this sounds like change we should all believe in.
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