corrente

Reuters is reporting that the Bush administration is divided over whether or not to close down Guantanamo. Aside from puzzling over exactly WHO amongst those freedom lovers might be rankling over maintaining what is fast becoming the world's most populated albatross, I can guess who wants to keep it open. How about this for a clue:

"Vice President Dick Cheney says there are no plans for now to shutter the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay where terrorism suspects are held.
''The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people,'' he said.
''I mean, these are terrorists for the most part. These are people that were captured in the battlefield of Afghanistan or rounded up as part of the al-Qaida network,'' he said in an interview to be aired today on Fox News Channel's ''Hannity & Colmes.''"

That's your hard-core news show right there, isn't it, policy wonks? Dick "Go fuck yourself" Cheney won't tell the American people to whom he answers what he did in his energy policy meetings, but he'll shower Sean Hannity with interview largesse. And don't worry about those prisoners, 'cause they're "terrorists for the most part." He expands:

"'We've already screened the detainees there and released a number, sent them back to their home countries,'' Cheney said in the interview taped Friday. ''But what's left is hard core.''"

Hard core. And that includes the 14 year old:

"Lawyers representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say that there still may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before their 18th birthday and that the military has sought to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison camp.
One lawyer said that his client, a Saudi of Chadian descent, was not yet 15 when he was captured and has told him that he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantánamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm.
The lawyer, Clive A. Stafford Smith, of London, said in an interview that the prisoner, who is now 18 and is identified by the initials M.C. in public documents, told him in a recent interview at Guantánamo that he was seized by local authorities in Pakistan about Oct. 21, 2001, a few months shy of his 15th birthday, and taken to Guantánamo at the beginning of 2002."

So basically this kid spent almost his entire teenage years in Guantanamo. Must give him a warm fuzzy feeling when he casts a gaze northward.

I feel safer already, Uncle Dick.