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Home Front: WoT
Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray
2009-01-25
President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fate 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.
So one can't just snap one's fingers and close the place. Who knew?
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. They said the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses. After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusions as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," the former official said. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

Obama officials said that they want to make their own judgments. "The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable," another senior official said. But "it's clear that we can't clear up this issue overnight" partly because the files "are not comprehensive."
That's just an excuse. Whether the files are all in one place or not, the basic issues are known and have been known since George Bush ordered the detainees to Guantanamo in the first place:

1) What do you do with foreign nationals who are illegal combatants captured in the field?
2) If you let them live, how do you house and feed them? And where?
3) Can you detain them indefinitely? If so, where? If not, why not?
4) If you don't want to detain them indefinitely, how do you decide who to keep and who to release?
5) What if a detainee's country of origin doesn't want him?
6) What if a detainee's country of origin does want him for the purpose of torture?

The Bush administration worked diligently trying to solve these problems. They went to the appropriate Congressional oversight committees frequently over the last seven years and when committee members complained about one problem or another, the Bush team responded. And we had not one but two comprehensive Congressional bills passed, both with bipartisan support, only to see both overturned by a Supreme Court that couldn't itself provide any meaningful guidance.

Whether one is Republican or Democrat, it is nonsense to claim that the Bush administration was somehow irresponsible in addressing the issues. The Obama people know this because they're not stupid. So everything in this article is eyewash.
Posted by:Steve White

#9  Who gives a shit, Kaffe coffee?

Wake me up when the "international community" - most of whom are dictators, poseurs, and pissants - tries to institute some credibility with US. (Note I didn't way "restore" credibility - they've never had any. The only thing most of them are good at is whining while we do the heavy lifting.)
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut   2009-01-25 19:19  

#8  Looks like Barack is off to a great start, on track to keep his word and restore some international credibility for the US
Posted by: coffee   2009-01-25 18:53  

#7  Ima sure that the Big O is finding out that rhetoric is cheap, but solutions are expensive. His executive order in working to close Gitmo is a bone to be thrown to his fellow leftist travelers, and the EU, and others.

Now, faced with the reality of some real hardcases who are intent upon our destruction, he will have to make the tough decisions to get us all through this minefield safely.

So he has a choice to do something incredibly stupid, which can seriously cost us in lives in the future, or he can quietly try to do the right thing and deal with these people, to minimize the threat that they present.

Watch the hands and not the mouth. It should be interesting, in a clinical sense.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2009-01-25 17:50  

#6  Close Gitmo tomorrow. Return all the detainees to their home countries within 24 hours. Not a problem. Fly over at 40,000' and drop them out.
Posted by: Glenmore   2009-01-25 16:05  

#5  My thought too, James. There's way too much about sensitive sources and methods behind the capture of some of these who've been kept despite the other releases.
Posted by: lotp   2009-01-25 14:08  

#4  One basic rule of handling very sensitive information with references to sources and human intell on the ground is to compartmentalize it.
Break it into pieces and keep the pieces in separate places. The only repository of everything is in the case manager's head.

Seems that some of the info on these little darlings at Gitmo is extremely sensitive with lots of direct attribution to sources.

I think Obama will be very wise to find a way to stall the closing of Gitmo for a long time. Especially given the rate at which the "innocent" return to their neferious ways in AQ.
Posted by: James Carville   2009-01-25 13:55  

#3  The sources seem credible, yet I find it difficult to believe that there is that much "disarray" in the files of at least the principal bad guys. Or those whose cases have been brought/or close to the military commission stage. And the combatant status reviews were based on what, just some chit-chat between the govt. and a military judge? No materials were assembled for those?

Puzzling.

While I always racked it up to dealing with the outrageous and constitution-shredding malfeasance of the SCOTUS in the their ridiculous bait-and-switch antics, the intolerable delays in getting the commissions ball rolling down there might have had other elements, perhaps?
Posted by: Verlaine   2009-01-25 13:11  

#2  Too bad "W" could not have signed EO intent document like this prior to his departure.
Posted by: Besoeker   2009-01-25 08:52  

#1  It seems President Obama doesn't really want to close the Guantanamo facility, he just wants to be seen to be in the process of closing it. But then, the original examinations were to determine which of the prisoners could safely be released, and quite a few had been over the years.
Posted by: trailing wife    2009-01-25 08:27  

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