The CIA strikes again

MANIFESTO

A number of blogs have been following the lack of adequate case files on many of the detainees at Guantánamo, and, indeed, it's a sad but unsurprising tale:

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. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Of course, many former Bushies are trying to exculpate themselves.

[O]ther 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 conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

For me, the bottom line is this: The CIA, with the overt approval of the Bushies, locked up over 200 people without caring what the prisoners were being held for. I've spoken before about the similarity between the Bushies' behavior and the l'etat c'est moi attitude of France's kings before 1789; this episode is just another example. (E.g., J. Edgar Hoover, one of the great tyrants in American history, created hundreds of lists on perceived enemies of the state, but at least he had the documents.)

It's also one of the first examples of the arduous cleanup the Obamans will have to effect in order to set things right after the chaos of the last eight years.