Mutiny?

So you might think, from reading Reuters' report on Gitmo.
Since Obama took office in 2009, these people said, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo.

Negotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like "punching a pillow," said James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen."...

When the State Department added the four Afghans to a list of detainees prioritized for transfer in the summer of 2013, Defense Department officials resisted. At a meeting at the Pentagon, a mid-level Defense Department official said transferring the four "might be the president's priority, but it's not the Pentagon's priority or the priority of the people in this building," according to current and former administration officials present at the meeting.
The problem is, the actual things the report cites sound like genuine legal concerns. A big part of this may be the President's penchant for ignoring inconvenient laws running up against the military's penchant for running everything by the SJA as an ordinary part of the staffing process. It's hard to get the Pentagon to do things that are legal but only questionably so, or debatably so. Even at lower levels of organization a lot of cover needs to be available before people take risky actions. The closer you get to the guy on the field of battle, the more freedom there is. The higher you go, the more the legal structure ossifies and the decision-making process becomes averse to running legal risks.

In general, that's not a bad thing. It's good if the military is restrained by the law. Places where it has not been have not always turned out well. Willingness to obey 'the leader's orders' instead of the law is not healthy.

Besides, there's this:
Afterwards, State Department officials began referring to them as the "JV four" or "Junior Varsity four," for their seeming lack of importance to Taliban fighters.
Hmm, there's that "JV" again. I understand that none of these people apparently have military experience, so that college or high-school metaphors are all that work for their thought process. But don't you understand that the Junior Varsity often becomes the Varsity later in their career? That's why schools bother with a JV team: as a training ground and feeder for future star players on the big field.

With judgment like this, it would not be surprising if a few feet got drug in the Pentagon.

6 comments:

Ymar Sakar said...

That's why they have been purging the Pentagon and the US military. When enough of their subordinates have been inserted and promoted, "magically" results will then happen as if the will of the consensus had been reached and Democrat military generals could now be listened to, as they lectured Bush to.

Ymar Sakar said...

The Left has also been culturally and ideologically against jocks for some time now. Not sure why, but it's almost like a childhood trauma by now.

The Hollywood representation, the tv representation, the cable representation of football varsity teams as being miniature dictators (the way the Left thinks the world should work according to them), and the JV being smaller, less important dictators, seems applicable.

Cassandra said...

Checks and balances.

Anonymous said...

Al Haig set a certain precedent, which is well known among historians and people who work within our system.

Al Haig was White House Chief of Staff during the waning days of the Nixon administration. He was widely credited with keeping the wheels on the cart. Nixon would tell him all kinds of things to do, and he would ignore them. He played some sort of role in persuading Nixon to resign, and Ford to pardon Nixon, without leaving too much of a trail. Then he made the transition from the Nixon to the early days of the Ford administration.

Nobody doubts his ultimate loyalty to the United States of America.

Valerie

Grim said...

A name well known among patriots, Haig's.

Ymar Sakar said...

Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen."...

So basically the state department is getting the passive aggressive resistance that the State Department gave to the US patriots in Iraq and Afghanistan.