The youth vote was instrumental in securing Barack Obama the win on Nov. 4, 2008. But with the President comfortably settled in at the White House, we the youth supporters of candidate Obama must learn to become the critics of President Obama. Whether we voted for him or have grudgingly accepted that democracy sometimes means the other guy winning, it is up to all of us to hold the new administration accountable. By blogging his first 100 days in office, we hope to remind the new administration that just because the election is over, doesn’t mean we’ve stopped paying attention.
Day 1 — Jan. 21, 2009: Closing Guantanamo
Closing down the controversial and probably unconstitutional Guantanamo prison at the U.S.’s military base in Cuba was an obvious first act for Obama. In fact, if he’d waited even a day on this, I’d now be lambasting him for his inaction.
But though necessary, that doesn’t make the administration’s follow-up proper. The way Obama has handled the planning so far makes one worry about the damage that could be done if the confusion about what to do with those pesky detainees isn’t ameliorated, and soon. Bush got in trouble, with the public and the Constitution, for wasting indefinite amounts of time conniving ever more elaborate legalistic justifications.
The requested 120-day suspension of all proceedings has been granted, but Obama would be wise to present his solution short of that generous deadline. The matter may be complicated and Bush’s fixes may be difficult to reverse, but with Guantanamo so high on Obama’s promise list, one would have hoped he had a plan already.
Disheartening, however, is that it seems Obama had counted on EU countries lining up, jails wide open, volunteering to take on our detainees, most of them with confusing and questionable legal statuses (Tellingly, of the 245 detainees in Gitmo, only 21 had been formally charged under Bush’s military tribunals).
The problem arises when it’s impossible to send detainees back to their home countries for fear that they’ll be tortured or killed, yet their American detention is sketchy at best. That Obama’s best solution so far has been to try and dump these legally toxic prisoners on European countries, especially the 27-member EU, is alarming and indicative of what Obama’s attitude will be toward an EU-American relationship.
“We didn’t catch these people. We didn’t put them into prison,” the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg, told the European Parliament on Tuesday. The Germans and the Dutch are also wary of taking on prisoners that the U.S. doesn’t want anymore.
Meanwhile, Portugal is trying to convince other EU countries to take on Guantanamo detainees while it’s likely that Britain will at least accept their own nationals, according to the IHT.
Obama’s inability to have predicted and prepared for such a divided reaction showcases some of his foreign policy weaknesses. “It is possible that Obama as an instinctive multilateralist will look to the EU. I think he may be disappointed by European divisions, impotence and lack of capabilities,” Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research organization in London, told the IHT.
Without quick action that doesn’t naively or simplistically rely on European support, closing Gitmo will be remembered as Obama’s first major blunder, blighting what everyone hopes will be a record more civilized and more humane when dealing with suspected terrorists.
Bonus: The St. Petersburg Times has collected around 500 promises Obama made during his campaign and will be tracking whether he keeps, breaks, or compromises on them.
Move forward to day 2.