If you read the outpouring of coverage on Omar Khadr on the weekend you might be wondering why President Obama hasn't kept his pledge to close Guantanamo by the end of this year, and why he's allowing cases like Khadr's to go to the military tribunals George Bush was so heavily abused over.
You'd think there would be a ready explanation for those two questions. There has, after all, been a flood of coverage on the Khadr case and Guantanamo. A new wave hit on Friday, after the White House decided to split the trials, sending some Guantanamo detainees to tribunals and others -- like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- to a civilian criminal court.
But there isn't. Coverage on Khadr's predicament concentrated on finding critics to blast the decision, without trying to explain it. Maybe that's because the media outlets disagreed with it. But last time I looked, news reports were supposed to inform and explain, not just take positions and then seek out rent-a-quotes chosen because they agree with the reporter's position. That's what we get on Khadr, though: an announcement followed by ritual denunciations by civil libertarians, lawyers sympathetic to Khadr, members of the NDP and "activists" whose expertise, as usual with activists, is limited to their firm belief in the righteousness of their opinions.
Maybe they're right in denouncing Obama. But it must have occurred to someone besides me that Obama's procrastinating is worth an explanation. The promise to close Guantanamo was his first major action after becoming president. He pledged to close it during his campaign and signed an executive order to that effect the day after being sworn in. It would seem the reasons for his inability to deliver on that promise would be newsworthy.
Apparently not. Apparently ritual denunciation without explanation is the standard for news coverage these days. You won't find an explanation in any of these publications. They didn't even try. They're just interested in quotes from critics.
The truth is that Obama's timetable has been delayed because it's far easier to demand simplistic actions than it is to deliver on them. The activists, lawyers and opposition politicians don't have to face this reality, but the president does. As Canwest correspondent Steven Edwards reported in July, Obama is shackled by the fact that Americans aren't really as eager as portrayed to shut down Guantanamo. A poll found a narrow majority favoured keeping it open. If it is closed, they certainly don't want its inmates transferred to the U.S. Neither do other countries, which have resisted Washington's entreaties to take some of the detainess of its hands.
“It is easy to say that Guantanamo can be closed when you are a candidate for president,” Senator Orin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said in the Senate this week. “What is hard is taking a deliberative methodical approach and then formulating the proper plan to balance the safety of this country with the needs of lawful detention.”
A possible solution to the problem was unveiled on the weekend when Illinois proposed moving the detainess to the Thomson Correctional Center,a jial outside Chicago that was built in 2001 and has 1,600 cells, but contains only about 150 minimum-security prisoners. Local officials are eager for the economic boost that would come from turning it into a maximum-security home for the worst of Guantanamo. But there is certain to be an outcry about the prospect of terrorist killers finding a permanent home in the U.S., even behind prison walls.
The U.S. Justice Department has also created guidelines for trying detainees before civilian or military courts, which were reported here, months before Friday's announcement. But you wouldn't know that from the coverage.
Source: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/16/kelly-mcparland-ignorance-is-bliss-for-khadr-cheerleaders.aspx
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