Closing Gitmo would defeat the entire purpose

if this does indeed happen, it's going to remove the primary reason why detainees have been held outside the u.s. - the excuse that u.s. law does not apply in a place like guantánamo... there will be some serious implications arising from a decision to close gitmo, all of them, i hope, favorable to restoring our historic and enormously important system of justice... and i hope the first thing that gets restored is habeas corpus...

The Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere, The Associated Press has learned.

President Bush's national security and legal advisers are expected to discuss the move at the White House on Friday and, for the first time, it appears a consensus is developing, senior administration officials said Thursday.

The advisers will consider a new proposal to shut the center and transfer detainees to one or more Defense Department facilities, including the maximum security military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where they could face trial, said the officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal deliberations.

Officials familiar with the agenda of the Friday meeting said Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Peter Pace were expected to attend.

It was not immediately clear if the meeting would result in a final recommendation to Bush.

i posted this back in february on the basic purpose of guantánamo...

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law.

—Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, January 2007, to the author, Marie Brenner, in the article, Taking on Guantánamo, Vanity Fair, March 2007.

does closing gitmo mean we're not going to torture any more...?

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