no catch and release

Crossposted at RedState.

The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
- Sun Tzu

Patrick’s post today on de-gimmicking the conservative movement makes an excellent point. We need to choose our battles, find conservative policies with overwhelming public support, and vigorously advance them in non-ideological terms. The approach worked with the Contract for America in 1994, and it worked with Drill Here Drill Now last year. When we find conservative policies with overwhelming support and draw upon the American people to create change, it works very well.
 
President Obama's January 22nd executive order, which ordered the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, opened the door to such a winning 80/20 American issue. President Obama’s order will close the Guantanamo facility within one year of its signing and ordered an extensive revision of terrorist detainee policy which would determine where the Guantanamo detainees will go and what will happen to the detainees of the future. The executive order was a controversial document that has been assaulted from both the left and the right. However, most Americans overwhelmingly agree with conservatives on the key issue at hand and we should use this opportunity to advance sound national security policy, not gimmickry.
 
The Combatant vs. Criminal Battle and the Features of the Field
 
At its core, this is a struggle over whether terrorist detainees should be treated as civilian criminals or as combatant prisoners of war. Conservatives typically believe that terrorists should be treated as combatants, and liberals believe they should be treated as criminals.
 
This is a complex issue, and the major polls investigating the question can sometimes be misleading. For example, a recent ABC poll claimed that Americans supported trying detainees in civilian courts over releasing them to their home countries by a 2-1 margin. This may seem to demonstrate support for the terrorist-as-criminal position, but the question did not include the option of military tribunals.
 
Fortunately, when presented with the choice of providing detainees with civilian trials or using the military tribunal system, Americans strongly believe terrorist detainees should be treated as combatants, not criminals. In a January 27th Rasmussen poll, 69% said that terrorists should not be given all the rights of citizens, and 59% supported using military tribunals vs. 26% who supported using civilian trials to process detainee cases.
 
Furthermore, Americans do not want Guantanamo detainees (and presumably future detainees) transferred to the US, and certainly not in their own communities. A recent Opinion Dynamics poll reveals that 63% of all Americans, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, do not want prisoners from Guantanamo Bay moved to prisons in their community, and a 52-47% majority do not want them in the US at all.
 
It is important to note that Guantanamo Bay itself has a negative connotation in the minds of the public that puts downward pressure on polling regarding the central criminal vs. combatant debate. The Rasmussen poll did not mention Guantanamo Bay in its questions about military tribunals and measured a large 33-point terrorist-as-combatant majority, while the ABC poll measured support for ‘continuing to hold [detainees] at Guantanamo’ rather than military tribunals and returned a relatively small 53-42 majority in favor of the terrorist-as-criminal approach.
 
With this knowledge and the work of Frank Luntz in mind, it would be wise for those of us who hold the terrorist-as-combatant view to let the Guantanamo Bay facility close. We should instead focus on the future by pushing the Administration to adopt a forward-looking counterterrorism detainee policy that is based on the terrorist-as-combatant view held by most Americans when Guantanamo is out of the picture. Sixty-eight percent of Americans, including majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats, right-of-center terrorism experts Charles Stimson and James Jay Carafano, and even Newt Gingrich support the creation of a new set of clear international rules to set transparent guidelines for how countries can fight the War on Terror. If the process of creating these rules is transparent, the American people have the ability to provide their input into the process, and we have experts to publicly articulate the terrorist-as-combatant approach, the result would be a clearer, more stable system than what we have now which would ensure that dangerous combatants are not treated like fish in some catch-and-release system and allowed to return to the battlefield and kill again.  
 

Last Friday, President Obama met with a group of terrorism survivors in the White House and announced that all charges were dropped against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2001. This event was mostly overshadowed by the uproar surrounding the spending bill in the Senate, but it marks a dangerous milestone as the Obama Administration begins to deal with the messy repercussions of closing the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

The President will face a number of tough decisions over the next year as he prepares to move detainees to other facilities, and it is certain that there will be a great deal of pressure on him to treat these detainees as common criminals and even to let go some of the 200 detainees considered too dangerous to release.

Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of treating the risk of releasing Guantanamo prisoners as a hypothetical issue. The Pentagon estimates that 62 former Guantanamo detainees have already returned to active involvement in terrorist organizations and that one has even risen to be the second in command of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

In response to this troubling turn of events, Students for Victory recently launched the No Catch and Release petition campaign. No Catch and Release will gather public support for three general principles for handling the Guantanamo detainees. Each of the three principles are already supported by majorities of the American people. President Obama has repeatedly stated that he wants to listen to the ideas of all Americans, so this is our chance to make our voices heard.

You can read and sign the petition at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.

In just five months, Newt Gingrich’s Drill Here Drill Now campaign prepared the environment that allowed the #dontgo Revolution to take place and win an important policy victory for energy independence. We may not have the eloquence of Newt or the resources of American Solutions, but we do have a fired up and united grassroots ready to act to make this country safer.

We at Students for Victory are urging President Obama to follow these principles and we are building a widespread coalition of activists, bloggers, and organizations who will work with us to do the same. You can publicly endorse the principles and join the coalition at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.

All Americans have the right to have their voices heard. We face an uphill struggle against organized groups that favor releasing prisoners our soldiers fought to apprehend, but one signature at a time, one message to a friend at a time, and one blog post at a time, each of us can make a difference and act to help keep our loved ones safe.

We hope you’ll sign the petition, join the coalition, and get involved in the movement at http://www.studentsforvictory.com/savelives.