Dateline Gitmo

Bowing to congressional critics who have pushed for a shutdown of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the White House today announced that the facility would no longer house enemy combatants but would instead be used to hold reporters who refuse to identify their sources.

Vice President Dick Cheney made the announcement, calling the decision to reinvent Guantanamo as a detention center for recalcitrant journalists a “win-win situation.”

“For weeks, people have been calling for us to stop holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo, while at the same time, the jailing of journalists has raised the specter of prison overcrowding,” Cheney said at a news conference in Washington. “Holding reporters at Guantanamo will kill two birds with one stone.”

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, recently jailed for refusing to name her sources, would be the first inmate of the journalistic detention center at Guantanamo, Cheney said, adding that the blindfolded Miller would be transferred there today from the jail in Virginia where she is currently imprisoned.

Although the vice president refused to speculate as to whether Miller might change her mind about divulging her sources while at Guantanamo, he added with a smile, “Let’s put a hood on her and see what happens.”

Cheney brushed aside a question about whether holding reporters at Guantanamo represented inhumane treatment that could be in violation of the Geneva Convention.

“There’s no way that reporters are going to be treated any worse at Gitmo than they are already treated right here at the White House,” the vice president said.

Elsewhere, NASA officials said that the launch of the space shuttle would be put on hold indefinitely, citing problems with “a fuel thingy.”