New York Times:
In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantanamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.
Mr. Gates's appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush's publicly stated desire to close Guantanamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantanamo's continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.
Mr. Gates's arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.
We already knew that Cheney is freakin' evil and Gonzales isn't looking like a Boy Scout either. So, of course, those are the people The Decider decides to listen to. Alberto Gonzales' poor judgement is becoming more apparent every day and what the hell has Dick Cheney been right about since taking the office of Vice President? Why does anyone listen to these guys anymore?
The New York Times Editorial Board comes to a distrubing conclusion -- that Guantanamo doesn't exist to serve the 'War on Terror,' but merely to expand the president's power.
Mr. Bush rejected that sound advice [to close Guantanamo], heeding instead the chief enablers of his worst instincts, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Their opposition was no surprise. The Guantanamo operation was central to Mr. Cheney's drive to expand the powers of the presidency at the expense of Congress and the courts, and Mr. Gonzales was one of the chief architects of the policies underpinning the detainee system. Mr. Bush and his inner circle are clearly afraid that if Guantanamo detainees are tried under the actual rule of law, many of the cases will collapse because they are based on illegal detention, torture and abuse -- or that American officials could someday be held criminally liable for their mistreatment of detainees.
It was distressing to see that the president has retreated so far into his alternative reality that he would not listen to Mr. Gates -- even when he was backed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, like her predecessor, Colin Powell, had urged Mr. Bush to close Guantanamo. It seems clear that when he brought in Mr. Gates, Mr. Bush didn't want to fix Mr. Rumsfeld's disaster; he just wanted everyone to stop talking about it...
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