Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo

In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo’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.

As Mr. Gates was making his case, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined him in urging that the detention facility be shut down, administration officials said. But the high-level discussions about closing Guantánamo came to a halt after Mr. Bush rejected the approach, although officials at the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department continue to analyze options for the detention of terrorism suspects.

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Iraq: Four years later

From Truthdig: By Robert Scheer





Yep, you did it, George--mission impossible accomplished. Unbelievably, four years of a bungled occupation have managed to make Saddam Hussein's tyranny look good in comparison with "liberated Iraq."

At least, that is the view of the Iraqi weightlifter made famous through a video of him taking a sledgehammer to Saddam Hussein's statue.

"I really regret bringing down the statue," Kadhim al-Jubouri said on British television this week. "The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day."

That's the judgment of a man who spent nine years in Hussein's jails, and, unfortunately, it is one shared by a majority of his countrymen, according to an authoritative poll sponsored jointly by ABC, BBC and USA Today: Only 38 percent of Iraqis believe that the country is better off today than under Hussein, while nearly four out of five oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

Even more disturbing is that 51 percent of Iraqis think it is OK to attack coalition troops--triple the number that thought that way in a 2004 survey. Square that with our president's assurances, offered since the first month of this unnecessary adventure, that the insurgency represents a small handful of terrorists. While most of the antipathy is registered among Sunnis, 94 percent of whom favor attacks on coalition forces, and by only 7 percent of Kurds, a surprising 35 percent of Shiites endorse that sort of violence.

Given the number of Kurds and Shiites who originally welcomed the invasion, it is also startling that 53 percent of all Iraqis polled agreed that "from today's perspective, and all things considered," it was "wrong that U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in spring 2003."

The poll, part of a series conducted each of the past three years at great risk to 150 pollsters, reveals a sharp rise in anti-American feeling and disapproval of the 2003 invasion.

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Click here (pdf file) for the complete poll data.

Left Behind

( CBS ) When U.S. troops invaded Iraq, they had a major handicap – they didn’t speak the language. There would have been no progress, and likely more American dead, had it not been for Iraqi citizens who volunteered to serve our armed forces as translators.


Many thousands of Iraqis believed in the cause. They signed on as drivers, construction workers and office workers. But now they and their families are being hunted down by insurgents bent on killing them for collaborating. No wonder many are fleeing Iraq, desperate for asylum. But as they appeal to the U.S., many feel they’re being left behind.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, they’re finding that America, which was so eager for their help in the beginning, is not so eager to save them now.

Read the full 3 page article here.