New maximum-security jail to open at Guantanamo Bay

One of the things that has made the neo-cons so formidable is their stubbornness. Their sheer pigheaded refusal to accept any form of reality other than the one that they demand we all conform to, even when every rational argument says that they are wrong. Indeed, especially when every rational argument says that they are wrong.

It was this arrogant mindset that allowed Cheney to continue to claim that Saddam approached Niger for Uranium, even after most sane people on the planet had long accepted that this simply had not happened.

It was this same mindset that allowed Rumsfeld to make his spectacularly ill-informed comments about how the war was progressing in Iraq, demanding that we ignore the evidence in front of our eyes and believe that what we were looking at was an approaching victory.

Now, we witness this stubbornness again.

Just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that the administration's system for trying prisoners using military tribunals breached United States and international law, and with every sane person believing that this ruling spelled the end of Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration has announced that it is opening a new prison on the Cuban enclave.

Those of us who thought that, at last, the administration would accept it had contravened international law, underestimated the sheer intractability of this regime's mindset.

The Bush administration has signalled its intention to introduce new legislation that would circumvent the court's ruling. The revelation that Camp 6 is poised to open is proof that it intends to keep using the prison.

This has produced an inevitable backlash of international condemnation.

Amnesty International's UK campaigns director, Tim Hancock, said: "This appears to make a mockery of President Bush's statements about the need to close down Guantanamo Bay. In addition to strongly urging the President to step in to prevent any extension to this already notorious prison camp, we call on him to speed up the process of closing Guantanamo and of ensuring that all detainees are allowed fair trials or released to safe countries."

Zachary KatzNelson, senior counsel with the group Reprieve, which represents 36 Guantanamo prisoners, argued that public opinion and the courts would ultimately force the US to close the camp down. "If Bush had the choice, he would not shut it, and the men [held there] would never see the light of day, and neither would their stories come out," he said. "The reality is that the world knows too much. He has to shut it down."

I fear that the senior counsel from Reprieve is making an assumption that Bush and his neo-con cohorts care what the rest of the world thinks.

All indications are, not only that they don't, but that they never feel more sure of a policy than when it causes the greatest outrage.

We have entered the Ann Coulter world of politics, where our outrage is merely held up as evidence that we are wimps and they have the balls to make the "tough decisions."

They have constructed an argument in which, in their own minds, they can never lose. This is because their argument is essentially based on their faith, their religious certainty.

It is a world in which facts become irrelevant. In truth, this has always been the way of the Bush White House as Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Despite every defeat they have suffered, despite an Iraq war that spirals out of control, despite Israel engaging in acts that may lead to chaos in the Middle East, it is this same mindset that continues to dominate the Bush administration.

Reality is what they say it is. The new prison on Guantanamo is merely more proof, were any needed, that their suicidal faith in their own sense of righteousness continues undiminished.

And as Bush now seeks to dispense this same logic towards the tinder box that is the Middle East, anyone who believes in God should start to pray.

Tags: Guantanamo, Bay, new, prison, Bush, neo-cccons, mindset,