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From Sunday's NYT:

In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects.

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.

That's wonderfully rational. Don't like what you are reading? Shred the documents! Burn the books! That will take care of the problem!

Still, several officials said privately that the detainee legislation might fail to meet a primary goal of those inside the administration who had advocated change: quelling domestic and international criticism and moving past the federal lawsuits that have tied up parts of the detention apparatus since 2002.

“There have been so many times when we thought we had broken through and turned things around, and then the forces on the other side kept charging back,” said one administration lawyer who has supported such changes. Now, the official added, “even after what was supposed to be this major legislation to resolve these issues, we are going to be back at it.”

I don't mean to sound overly cynical, but isn't that the point? From a policy perspective, sure, this approach is incredibly stupid. But from a political perspective, or rather, from an approach to governance that sees it as identical to politics, and an approach that sees a politics of fear as something positive, an endless repetition is precisely what you would want. And given that we know based on their behavior that this president and his advisors see the war on terror as a political issue first and foremost...