WASHINGTON--It should come as little surprise that Bermuda and Palau have agreed to become dumping grounds for some of the inmates whom President Barack Obama promised to remove from America’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp by next January.With most Americans opposed to bringing into the United States any of the “enemy combatants” whom the Bush administration imprisoned at the Cuba island, the Obama administration has tried mightily to persuade other nations to accept most of them. While a handful of these men will be tried by an American military tribunal, most of them face nothing more than the uncertainty of when and where they’ll be released.
Even so, getting another country to take in prisoners the Obama administration is willing to release has been a hard sell, which is probably why it has turned to Bermuda and Palau.
The United States is an important economic lifeline to both.
Bermuda (a nation about a third the size of Washington, D.C.), last week, accepted four Chinese Muslim detainees from Guantanamo.
Tourism is Bermuda’s second largest industry, and 80 percent of its tourists are Americans.
Palau (a Pacific Ocean nation with a land mass smaller than the city of New York) has agreed to take in 17 Chinese Muslims.
That country’s major employer is its government, which relies heavily on foreign aid from America.
The Chinese Muslims, who were taken into custody in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are members of an ethnic separatist movement in China.
The Pentagon has determined that they posed no threat to the United States, but they have remained in Guantanamo awaiting a country that would accept them.
The Obama administration considered bringing some of them into the United States, but backed off after a firestorm of opposition from Congress.
Last month, Congress refused a request for $80 million to pay the cost of relocating the detainees until the Obama administration makes clear where these people will be sent. Some European allies have indicated a willingness to allow detainees who pose no threat to resettle within their borders, but President Obama should not expect other countries to bear the full burden of such a plan.
Of course, the Obama administration didn’t create this problem. It inherited it from its predecessor.
It is also a problem President Obama promised during the campaign to fix, if elected.
True, his efforts to make good on that vow have been hampered by fear-mongering congressional Republicans and Democrats, but, by asking other nations to do what his own country is unwilling to do, the president is made to look like a hypocrite.
The Guantanamo detainees are this nation’s responsibility those who are thought to pose no threat to our national security and those who do.
The goodwill President Obama has amassed abroad will be seriously damaged if he caves in to congressional naysayers who want to keep all those inmates out of this country.
It’s possible the administration will be able to “persuade” more nations like Bermuda and Palau, which are tethered to the United States, to take all the detainees scheduled for release, but that will come at great political cost to a presidency that promised to break with this nation’s domineering ways of the past.
Our enemies will decry America’s troubling doublespeak, and our allies will bemoan the administration’s strong-arming of its friends as the kind of American muscle flexing they hoped his election brought to an end.
