Given the growing chorus urging the Bush administration to shutter the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, it's hardly surprising that Vice President Dick Cheney would suggest, as he did at the National Press Club this week, that critics of the camp simply want its approximately 520 inmates to go free "to complete their original mission of trying to kill Americans." But give Cheney credit. Beneath the demagoguery, he made an important point: Guantánamo is little more than the by-product of a need to detain suspected terrorists captured abroad and question them--a need that will endure beyond Gitmo's Camp Delta. "If we didn't have that facility at Guantánamo," Cheney contended, "we'd have to have it someplace else."

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