Team Bush's once formidable message discipline seems to be breaking down. Watch and see as aides to Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates tell all about their bosses efforts to get the Gitmo detention facilities shut down, and the ways Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney stymied those efforts. They even say explicitly that Gonzalez' political weakness is a reason for raising the issue again.
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Message Discipline
25 Mar 2007 12:41 pm
Comments (13)
In all honesty, there is one Republican in all of existence whom I would consider voting for for president, and that is Robert Gates.
I am from College Station, Texas (home of Texas A&M), one of the most conservative towns in America. When Bob Gates became president of A&M, he immediately started to change not just the university, but the town, bringing in more foreign students, liberal students, and liberal professors. Yes, he was kind of a one-man act, but he did more to improve that town than all of his predecessors combined...
Now, as secretary of defense, he's come in and tried to do exactly the right things - close Guantanamo, withdraw from Iraq, avoid shouting matches with people like Putin. Sadly, Bush and Cheney have rendered him pretty ineffective. Still, he remains my only hero in the entire conservative universe...
Delay has denounced A&M along with Baylor. There's no accredited college conservative enough for Tom.
Bush needs Gates more than Gates needs Bush. If he wants a change in policy he should be able to make it happen.
Now you know why Bush is backing Freddo. If he takes Freddo fishing on Lake Tahoe, he's got to find another AG who will stand up to Condi and Gates. This side of John Yoo who will do that? I'd guess the Dems will insist that any AG nominee close Gitmo. No Gitmo shutdown, no new AG.
I've never understood what the point of Gitmo is. Is it simply that Cheney, Gonzales, et al. get off on torturing people? It is not as if Gitmo were actually accomplishing anything toward the so-called War on Terror, or any other plausible goal . . .
Word on the street is high level Bush cabinet members get off on naked Middle-eastern man-pyramids...
Better than Libby's bear-rape fantasies.
The point of Gitmo is its relative inaccessibility.
If you built a maximum-security prison on the mainland just for the Gitmo detainees and moved them all there, then everyone from attorneys to the press to the Red Cross could drive up to the gates every day and ask to be let in and see how the prisoners were being treated, and write stories about what they found, or even how they were turned away.
I don't know whether one can get to Gitmo by any means other than military transport, but even if so, you can't just walk up to the gate.
So Bush and Cheney's minions can do pretty much what they want down there, without any ongoing publicity about it. Just the way they like to run pretty much everything.
Congress could mandate the closure of Gitmo if it wanted, and it should.
Leave Gitmo open so we have a place to put AG, Condi, Dick, Georgie-boy and the rest of 'em after my man Hillary wins. We could move Scooter-pie down there now to start training the bears so they'll be in top rape-shape by '09 when the hammer comes down.
Rodham Clinton '08- I was for bear rape before I was against it.
Um ... the point of Gitmo is pretty obviously to keep the prisoners out of reach of the usual judicial process, right?
There are a lot of inaccessible places in the country, but few of them provide grounds for a reasonable (albeit pernicious) argument that the Constitution doesn't apply.
I don't know whether one can get to Gitmo by any means other than military transport, but even if so, you can't just walk up to the gate.
JFTR, this is correct. Journalists can go for Potemkin tours, if they agree to certain restrictions, with prisoners carefully edited out. Lawyers can go if they have a security clearance, a court order permitting them to go, a theater clearance, and a country clearance. And then they'll have a military escort who sticks to them like glue the entire time they are on the Windward side of the bay. (The main part of the base).
An in-country detention facility would also probably give the press considerably easier access to the facility staff, even if they were denied access to the prisoners. Harder to keep secrets if any journalist who just hangs around can figure out who all your staff are and then see if any of them are willing to leak.
The last time I checked Gitmo was a place to detain enemy combatants IAW the Laws of Land Warfare. At Gitmo a tribunal will determine if they will be treated as legal or illegal combatants, again IAW the Laws of Land Warfare. By keeping them off American soil you block some bleeding hearts from using the legal system to litigate for rights that as enemy combatants they are not entitled to.
Having been to Gitmo, I can tell you that we are treating the latest detainees better than we treated Cuban detainees back in 94 - 95.
Comments closed April 08, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It's amazing what control of Congress will change. A lot of the career government people are starting to speak up now who wouldn't have when it seemed that the Rove team would control American government forever, and big media people like Chris Mathews have started to turn too. And the administration people have to be sweating indictment and impeachment a little.
Hopefully the collapse will be as spectacular as the power grab was bold. They've pushed everything to the limit, so they don't really a cushion or a safe fall-back position.
Posted by John Emerson | March 25, 2007 1:09 PM