Legal Commentary

The Incompetence of Evil

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Gitmo: There Are No Files.

The Bush people told us over and over that the people held at Gitmo were super-dangerous. That’s why they couldn’t release them, or even try them in the US. (Judges who reviewed selected cases in the main didn’t agree, but put that aside.)

Now we learn the farcical basis on which decisions to hold people were being made:

“President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner.

Beyond my darkest imaginings.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on January 25, 2009 (boomark / email).