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The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
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In Sunday’s interview with “60 Minutes,” President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed that “it is a top priority for us to stamp out al-Qaida once and for all,” adding, “and I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out al-Qaida.” Obama argued that the Saudi terrorist “is not just a symbol” but is rather “the operational leader” of the organization, which he said is still planning attacks against U.S. targets.

Obama’s quiet seriousness of purpose is a welcome contrast with George W. Bush’s swaggering pronouncements about bin Laden being “wanted dead or alive,” or his darkly comic standard answer to the question of why bin Laden has not yet been caught. “He’s hiding,” Bush likes to say.

And for those who believe Bush, obsessed with Iraq, has either not tried very hard or has secretly avoided capturing bin Laden, Obama’s words are probably reassuring. Now American attention will return to the real author of 9/11, and a more determined effort might yield fruit. But the question is whether the new president should really focus his attention on bin Laden, and spend his political capital in a renewed attempt to bring him to justice. There are many reasons why a stepped-up and publicized pursuit of bin Laden may prove costly to Barack Obama.

The first is the danger of failing, just like his predecessor. After the bravado of the early post-9/11 period, and vows to catch his quarry, Bush came up empty. An enemy who struck at the beginning of his first term is still at loose in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands at the end of his second. (more…)

If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama came close to questioning the "bipartisan" consensus on U.S. foreign policy, that the U.S. should be the prime mover and shaker in the world at large. They differ, and in some ways that are fairly important, on details. But on the central question of whether it is the United States’ job to go out there and fix the world, there was no disagreement.

To be sure, taking candidates at their word during a debate is not necessarily advisable for one who would be so foolish as to try to predict what they will do once in office. Politicians as a breed are not noted for being especially candid on the campaign trail, of course. Furthermore, every president faces unexpected foreign-policy challenges (Truman didn’t expect Korea, Carter didn’t expect Iran, Dubya didn’t expect 9/11, etc.). Still, the Bushlet has left some open sores out there in the rest of the world. So the next president is likely to have to deal with winding down the war in Iraq and figuring out what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will require reaching some kind of accommodation with Iran. Neither candidate seems to realize this, so they competed to see who could say the most childishly nasty things.

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A letter recently appeared in the Washington Post that got me thinking about John Walker Lindh again. You remember him… The so-called “American Taliban” sentenced to 20 years in prison for “aiding the Taliban”. In reality, Lindh was more likely likely an unwitting victim of an emotionally fragile post-9/11 United States as well as a guinea pig for U.S. torture policy elsewhere.

As it turns out, the FBI allowed Lindh to be abused in various ways, perhaps insignificant compared to incidents in Iraq and Guantánamo, but abuses nonetheless. In retrospect, the revelation that Lindh was subject to abuse should not be a surprise. In the foamy-mouthed ideological environment of Bush’s “War on Terror”, Lindh was just another tool to forward the administration’s propaganda machine. (more…)