Day One of the new Obama era and although many other judgments have probably already been sketched out by his administration, the very first decision that the new president chose to announce was highly significant. He requested US military tribunals trying detainees in Guantanamo Bay be suspended for 120 days “in the interests of justice”. Though couched in soft terms, this is an order from the US commander in chief. It will be obeyed.
It is now unthinkable that these tribunals in which Bush empowered the military to be jury, judge and jailer will now continue. The evidence against the detainees is to be reviewed. Some of these men have claimed to be Al-Qaeda fighters and leaders. If they are to be tried for crimes, it seems certain it will be within the normal US judicial system, in which they will have full rights. And if found guilty, it will be in the US prison system that they will serve their defined sentences. The end of the horrific Kafka-esque nightmare in which the detainees have been kept in limbo indefinitely is at last in sight.
At a stroke on his first day in office, Obama has begun to set right one of the greatest of the many injustices which so besmirched George W. Bush’s two-term presidency. But this was probably the easiest decision the new president could make. As he promised on the campaign trail, he also yesterday consulted with top military commanders on how quickly the US occupation of Iraq could be ended.
But far tougher decisions await Obama over the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza and the hardly less devastated Palestinian peace process. Israeli troops quit Gaza by the time the new president took office. It was as if the outgoing Olmert government was trying to pretend the carnage and destruction it had caused had not in fact happened. The timing would certainly seem to be a recognition that its barbarous and disproportionate onslaught was likely to be unacceptable to the new administration in Washington. Still hoping to avoid defeat by the right-wing Likud, the Kadima-led coalition with Ehud Barak’s Labor Party might have hoped that 1,300 Palestinian lives and several thousand maimed and wounded would have given it an electoral boost.
However, Kadima’s new leader, the present Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has seen Likud actually lengthen its lead in the course of the Gaza bombardment. All that Palestinian blood shed for nothing. Or can it be that the Israeli voters think Likud under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu would have shed more blood?
Obama is no anti-Israeli. The key man in his inner team, Rahm Emanuel is a close friend as well as a convinced Zionist. But a man with the new president’s credentials for peace and justice could not have countenanced a continuation of the genocidal bloodletting in Gaza. As it is, Obama is likely to be as appalled as was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after he toured the battered Gaza ghetto Tuesday. But will he now back a UN war crimes case against Israel — as with the Gitmo tribunals suspension “in the interests of justice”?
