Un-freaking believable

[elfs]

File this one under "more insane than you can possibly imagine." If you thought my embrace of the rule of law and my call for prosecutions against those who violated it during the Bush era were shrill, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Last week, President Obama asked for the files prosecutorial officials had gathered on Guantanamo prisoners be assembled and reviewed by his staff at the Justice department. There's only one problem with his request: There are no files. Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, of the Reserve JAG Corps, wrote of the case he was assigned to prosecute:

To the shock of my professional sensibilities, I discovered that the evidence, such as it was, remained scattered throughout an incomprehensible labyrinth of databases primarily under the control of CITF [Criminal Investigation Task Force - elf], or strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks vacated by prosecutors who had departed the Commissions for other assignments. I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty. The state of disarray was so extensive that I later learned, as described below, that crucial physical evidence and other documents relevant to both the prosecution and the defense had been tossed into a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.

Got that? Over the course of six years of operation, holding these poor guys in detention, President Bush's Office of Military Commissions made no effort whatsover to create a systematic method of assembling evidence and tracking its whereabouts, defining procedures for assessing the validity of statements made by and about the suspect, none of that. The routine work that every police department and prosecutor's office, from the smallest town to New York City, goes through every day was ignored from the start at Guantanamo.

Juan Cole writes: "The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things." Spencer Ackerman wisely adds, "The truth of the matter is that just as not all of the Guantanamo detainees are guilty, not all of them are innocent, either, and so a process to cull one from the other is the appropriate way to proceed. What isn't ever appropriate, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, is to hold them indefinitely and without due process."

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I think the revelations coming out should (must!) be amplified, to the point when we, the people, force our president to instruct that the crimes be investigated and those persons guilty for them be held accountable.

It's basically how our country is supposed to work: checks and balances, one of which is public opinion which forces elected officials to do what's right under the law.

Obama has things he wants to do with his political capital; justice for the previous administration is low on that list. Banding together to reduce the price for obtaining such justice (in political capital) or actually make failure to administer such justice expensive would force his hand.

Let's.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Damned straight.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

The information on the administrative mess at Gitmo has been in the public domain for several years, ever since some of the first detainees got out and various military defense counsel spoke out about it.

I agree with you entirely, but I'm wondering, are you just becoming aware of it, in other words was there some sort of information control going on in the USA that meant you weren't aware of it, or is it just you're choosing to post about it now because of the Obama initiatives?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I think in this case it's the scale of the problem. We've known that the administrative mess there was, well, from our administration. What we didn't know, at least not to this extent, was the degree to which the administration frustrated or elided any attempt at all to create a systemetized justice system, or even the vague impression of one.

[purly.livejournal.com]

venal
It's a good word.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Incompetent? You think the records were not made out of incompetence?

My goodness. You have more faith in humanity than I do. This is the government beauracracy we're talking about. You have to go out of your way to order people to not make records, just in case they make them by mistake. Otherwise, people will get prosecuted for war crimes based on the documentation they themselves create!

Believe me when I say I'm *trying* not to invoke Godwin here, but the parallel is direct and quite pronounced. Hitler's Final Solution involved leaving *no record* of the extermination of the Jews. Read the forward of Anne Frank's diary for reference.

This isn't little-E evil, this is Capital-E Evil.