As can be seen from the subtitle, Lietzau says win the war
against al-Qaeda then close Gitmo knowing that as long as Gitmo is here, there
will be new recruits joining one of the al-Qaeda franchises already in existence,
or one that will pop up out of nowhere to spread around the Globe. In short,
what he is doing is create a paradox that will go like this: Gitmo is here
because al-Qaeda is here, and al-Qaeda is here because Gitmo is here. This is
how he hopes to keep the existing situation unresolved thus maintain it
indefinitely. It is to get America
involved in a war without end against disenchanted kids who get fed up with
American bombs raining on them, and decide to take the matter in their own
hands.
He calls ironic one of the reasons he gives for taking the
above position, and then admits that it is rooted in political shenanigans. He
explains it this way: “we would be closer to shuttering Guantanamo had we not tried to close it …
eliciting predictable legislative opposition.” Putting it this way, he
practically says that playing local politics with an international matter is
acceptable, and damn the consequences because the end justifies the means
especially if the end is to have a war with no end.
The next thing he does is to say – in his own peculiar way –
that two wrongs do make a right. This is how he puts it: “If Guantanamo
violate[s] human rights, then incrementally reducing the number of its victims,
without eliminating the violation, will not restore America 's reputation as a
human-rights leader.” What he is saying, in effect, is that you should stop
releasing prisoners even if you know they are innocent, because if we are
bastards in the eyes of the world, we'll be bastards whether we retain two hundred
prisoners or we retain one.
Having finished displaying this set of logical acrobatics,
he puts down the reasons why the current situation should be maintained as is.
This time he discusses the difference between the legal paradigm that applies
during wartime, and the paradigm that applies during peacetime. In war, he
says, you do not need to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, what you try to
do is prevent the prisoner from participating in the conflict against you
again. War also allows you to incarcerate someone till the end of hostility
which, in peacetime, would be called indefinite detention without trial. What
he fails to make clear, however, is that war is declared by at least one party
against another, and tell who declared war against whom.
Still, he goes on to say that in war, you either detain the
enemy or you kill him. If you make the rules of detention lax, you incentivize
killing him. Another good reason to detain the enemy is that you can
interrogate him, thus obtain the information that will allow you to win the war
more quickly and end the hostilities sooner. This is when you will want to
release the prisoners. And so, to fight a war effectively is to capture the
enemy and detain him.
But if you close Guantanamo ,
he says, you prolong the war and pretend it is not happening. And not once
during this whole presentation does Lietzau consider ending what he calls the
war by ending the bombing of innocent villagers who do nothing more than live
their simple lives as they have done for thousands of years.
Instead of that, he says that when it comes to targeting the
enemy, you can do extreme things that would constitute extrajudicial killing in
peacetime. War is supposed to be hell, he says, and forgoing detention makes
war appear less terrible because unlike a detainee that is near you –
constantly reminding you of it – the distant target of a lethal drone strike is
quickly forgotten.
But make no mistake, he goes on to say, both detention and
remote weapons are appropriate war-fighting tools. And this is the point at
which he admits that the so-called war on terror will continue into the
foreseeable future because you cannot kill terrorism with a drone: “In the long
term, it must be fought with law enforcement.”