Just stating the obvious:

1) Who cares what Dick Cheney thinks? He's just the veep, with almost no real legitimate power of his own.

2) Why, among all the modern, industrialized nations, are we the only ones who feel a need for an extralegal system for holding our prisoners of war?

...to find another Guantanamo. Cheney will allow Guantanamo to close, purely for PR reasons, only if some other location, outside US legal jurisdiction, can be found. That might be what they're waiting for...another location.

I'm having real trouble finding another example in US political history of a man as purely evil as Dick Cheney. I'm sure he feels he's doing "the right thing." don't all evil people feel that way?

Anyone have any other candidates for worst man in US politics since the founding?

had_enough, they already have alternatives to Gitmo--secret prison in Eastern Europe, Thailand and Afghanistan. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html

They've been in place since 9/11, so I don't see why they don't just close Gitmo (which has attracted so much negative attention) and use those. Unless, of course, it's to keep Gitmo as a lightning rod so we forget about the secret prisons overseas. Ah, so that’s Cheney’s evil plan.

Keep it in mothballs until W. Bush and Cheney and Tio Torture leave office. We need a place to send them and their brutal pals.

is nice this time of the year..

senior administration officials -- including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Alberto Gonzales -- were going to meet today to discuss it.

Boy, talk about a rogues' gallery. I bet if somebody used the Kohlberg Scale of stages of moral development to rank them, they'd come up with a negative number for the whole lot.

I think they're highly motivated to keep the extralegality (what a buzzword, how about "criminality" or "illegality") going as long as they can. And even if the Gitmo facility is shut down, they've got Turkey, Libya, and any number of Eastern European places they can likely warehouse people faster than you can say "Hostel II." So, don't put away the waterboards just yet!

The GOP is kinda fascinating, like their worship of power and their ideological blindness -- counting on power (legal or otherwise) to protect them from the consequences of their actions. They really are thugs, and don't underestimate shadow president Cheney, he certainly puts the "vice" in the Vice Presidency.

What is it exactly that we would all like to have done with the prisoners who are currently at Guantanamo? We want them sent to their home countries, sent elsewhere, sent to a third country, put on trial first? Someone has to decide these issues before the administration just up and closes the place. And you have to admit, there are at least one or two prisoners out there whom we don't want running around loose.

If you look at some of Bellinger's other statements on Guantanamo, you'll see he's a pretty stand-up guy, but these are the kinds of questions that he knows need to be resolved.

That's not to say that there isn't a fair amount of stonewalling going on from the Cheney clique, but there is, in my opinion, a critical mass of support for closing Guantanamo within the administration, which has been spearheaded by people like Rice and Bellinger, and they're trying to sort out how to go about doing that, legally, logistically, practially. Moreover, they aren't getting a whole lot of helpful suggestions from the outside chorus of people screaming "close Guantanamo!" It's kind of like the people screaming "US out of Iraq!" You might eventually convince the US to get out of Iraq, but it's not going to actually happen until there's some serious thought given to how to carry that out.

...the 'Commander Guy,' he's afraid of the Veep, right?

Isn't that kind of sad?

That is what Colin Powell said. I bet he thought about it seriously. The costs to this country in keeping it open outweigh the benefits. Find space at a military installation in the U.S. and move them now. Let the legal process then run it's course. What are you afraid of?

It's pretty damn hot and it's a frightfully dirty poor country. The Sinai's nice if you like that sort of thing. TTFN

Does anyone really think Bush has ever been the guy with the ideas and decisions. He's a fuckin howdy-doody. A cowboy who's afraid of horses. A draft dodger who where's a flight suit. A "C" student who went to Yale. A preemptive war mongering "Christian". A down-home, folksy plain-spoken, swaggering lyer who calls the richest one-percent of the country his base.

In short, Bush is big, huge, gigantic nothing.

and the people who still support him? Not much better.

Why is it a crime for enemy soldiers to kill our soldiers? That is what happens during wars. All soldiers captured on the battlefield are prisoners of wars and are not subject to prosecution unless their acts were against the customary rules of war.

I can guess as to why the stop: somebody who didn't really want to close the prison at Gitmo (ahem Cheney ahem) leaked the agenda, it was published in the media, and those who might be inclined to close it (ahem anybody left who's sane ahem) got scared of ol' Darth and tapped the brakes.

I would try to mix in more metaphors but I've not yet had my coffee.

Exactly correct. And it doesn't matter if they are from other countries either. More than 1500 Americans fought with the British during WWII, and even Hitler treated the few who were captured as POWs - treated them poorly but didn't treat them this poorly.

As always, it's worth considering how the gutless, craven opportunists in the Democratic Party will manage to fuck up this situation in heretofore unimaginable ways, and provide maximum political cover to this prototypical manifestation of Republican fascism. Undoubtedly, the Imbecile-in-Chief will reluctantly -- and with great magnanimity -- agree to close the Guantanamo Gulag and transfer its torturees to the American court system; all the Democrats will have to do is formally acknowledge that this was a completely lawful and appropriate step in the Global Neocon War on Muslims and Other Subhuman Savages, agree never to criticize the architects or operators of the Gulag in public, and possibly lick Bush's scrotum on the White House lawn.

Just for fun, let's pretend that the members of the Democratic Party were in possession of testicles all their own, and -- instead of groveling quietly on the sidelines in anticipation of the 2008 elections -- were motivated by an actual desire to salvage our democracy from the continuing depredations of this gang of Republican thugs. The strategy would be pretty damn simple: start immediate Congressional hearings featuring witnesses that have been kidnapped and tortured at Republican prisons throughout the world; point out in daily press conferences that the Republicans are in direct violation of the law as defined by the most conservative appellate court in the United States; accuse Bush of wanting to torture people far more than he wants to stop terrorists; and - most of all - participate in ZERO negotiations on closing Guantanamo. No one on the left gives a shit whether the Democratic Congress is successful at getting Bush to actually close Guantanamo. What we do care about is holding this aggregation of human filth accountable for their crimes and cleaning the stink of Republicanism from the U.S. political process.