Gitmo Gonzo?

Hat tip to Drudge for this AP story: the Bush administration is poised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The enemy combatants and terror suspects detained there would be moved elsewhere; possibly Leavenworth.

This needed to be done, but like most of the conciliatory moves by the administration, file this under "too little, too late". The wonks in the Bush administration are good at public relations but fail to grasp the power of symbols in the world imagination. Guantanamo is strange and exotic, dangerous-sounding, and Cold War-era. It should feature in a James Bond movie. Instead, it has been a rallying cry for opponents of the War on Terror, as every alleged excess that occurs there is blown out of proportion, and every court decision pertaining to one suspect or another is interpreted as a scathing rebuke of the administration or proof of its overwhelming power.

The fact that Gitmo was a bad idea in the first place has more to do with public relations politics than it does with winning the war on terror or maintaining civil rights. Now that the administration has grasped this, it can disarm the Democrat primarians of a powerful stump keyword.