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

[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.