There Are No Files

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_01/016593.php

By: Hilzoy

There Are No Files


From the Washington Post:

"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.

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 conclusion 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," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself."

Hmm. Incoming officials say there are no files. Some Bush administration ex-officials agree, but others say that there are files, and that the Obama administration is just making excuses. Who is right?

As it happens, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that deciding what to do with individual detainees at Guantanamo "will require going through all their files and evaluating the evidence against them". About an hour later, a commenter at Obsidian Wings who is in a position to know, and who is, in my experience, absolutely trustworthy, replied:

"There aren't files. No one believes this at first, and it takes a long time to accept it, but really, that's it: no files. There are databases that can be searched . . ."

It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I'm just glad they're finally gone.

[spanone]

1. k&r

[Greyhound]

2. If you make files, you create evidence, and the cabal learned from Nixon. n/t

[babylonsister]

4. It just makes the criticism of anything President Obama does

regarding Gitmo ring false if they couldn't even be bothered to have case files on these people.

[KittyWampus]

3. My guess who the official is trying to spin this for the evil bastards is Feith. The traitor is

getting airtime on NPR.

[KoKo]

12. And, quoting "anoymous officials high in Bush Administration" is a dead giveaway

of lies or spin. I believe little that WaPo or NYT's puts out. Too many "anonymous sources." Same old game from them.

[ThomWV]

5. I'm not at all suprised that there are no files, my question is were there any files

Just because there are none doesn't mean that there never were any.

[babylonsister]

6. Judging from the all around incompetence from the * admin,

I'm thinking no one bothered.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_01/016597.php

snip//

On the one hand, the Bush administration released some detainees who apparently turned out to be pretty dangerous. On the other, the Bush administration refused to release other detainees who weren't dangerous at all, and were actually U.S. allies.

How could this happen? In light of these revelations about the lack of files, it starts to make a lot more sense.

But to put this in an even larger context, consider just how big a mess Bush has left for Obama here. The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who've been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren't hard enough to clean up.

I'm reminded of something John Cole said the other day: "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."

[gratuitous]

7. Sure there aren't any files

Why would there be any files? That's a just a lot of hooey, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. When you're running an administration by magic, what need is there of files?

And just to explain, when I say the Bush administration ran on magic, I mean that they just dictated their wishes, and like Aladdin and his lamp, poof! it just happened. Bush wanted to throw some people into a deep, dark hole. Alakazam! Several hundred people are designated "enemy combatants" and just like that, the United States locks them up for years. They aren't "prisoners of war," they aren't "criminals," they aren't anything. They're "enemy combatants," a designation that has no legal meaning. And for years, the Bush administration, in sustaining the magical power of its word, kept putting forth arguments to try to justify its creation of a whole new classification of human being.

They were "the worst of the worst," even the 13-year-old. They weren't entitled to any consideration whatsoever, certainly not legal niceties like "evidence" or "charge" and absolutely not a writ of habeas corpus. As legal scholars argued over these unprecedented procedural assertions, the modern day oubliette of George W. Bush slowly consumed its victims. Files? You don't keep files and records for the stuff you scrape off your shoe; why would the Bush administration keep files on these poor bastards? Are they guilty of anything? I haven't the foggiest notion, and neither do their captors. Adjudicating their situations isn't why they were incarcerated. It was another power play, pure and simple. And judging by the supine reaction of the folks who are supposed to be our first line of inquiry in the Fourth Estate, it worked as well as it could have.

[coalition_unwilling]

9. Brilliant analysis! I would merely

add that 70% of Americans believe in "angels." Q.E.D.

[dixiegrrrrl]

20. WOW.

That was perfectly put.

[coalition_unwilling]

8. This story deserves way more

attention than it will receive!

To wit, if all but 60 can neither be tried in the US nor released, where is the data used to reach that conclusion???

Any competent habeas proceeding will insist on it, so WHERE ARE THE FILES?????

[Kali]

10. I've been trying to let go of the hatred -

nope, it is back. These fuckers must be brought to justice. (talkin' boosh & co, just in case that didn't read the way I meant it to)

[Peace Patriot]

11. I have felt for a while that Bushwhack torture and indefinite detention without trial

had a purpose that we don't know yet. Just ask yourself this: Do you believe that anything Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld and cohorts did was "to keep us safe"?

I don't. They do things to keep themselves safe. So, in what way were they keeping themselves safe by torturing and detaining these people (and also killing some, I'm sure), and--as we've learned--not keeping any records?

Covering the tracks of their own crimes, is my guess. They picked up targeted people who knew something about them, and embedded them in a general, random roundup, to distract and confuse anyone looking into it. A lot of innocent people got harmed in this way. Nothing to do with 9/11. Completely innocent of any kind of crime or offense. Or something understandable, like picking up a rifle when your country is being invaded by a foreign army. Some of them sold to the U.S. army by war lords. Some children. All thrown in together with the ones who were dangerous to the Bushwhacks or from whom the Bushwhacks needed to extract information, to lead them along trails of their own evil deeds, to track down, grab, torture and/or kill additional people in money and weapons networks, or operatives of various kinds, who might lead investigators back to the Bushwhacks. This would be great cover, because individual interrogators, torturers or prison officials might never grasp what, say, Donald Rumsfeld really wanted to know, or what he was doing with the information he received. They took orders on lines of questioning from their bosses who were taking orders from Rumsfeld or Cheney or other insiders. Probably the people who actually dealt with the prisoners believed that this was all part of a justifiable effort to prevent terrorism, but they of course could not see all the pieces of the puzzle--why interrogate this prisoner or that one? why ask this question or that question?

Could also have to do with business--say, weapons trafficking, or the heroine trade, or the oil leases in Iraq--profiting from information and covering up their ties to crimes and profiteering. I imagine they would want in to Muslim financial networks, which tend to be informal, not to catch the perps (or patsies?) of 9/11--they seemed to have zero interest in that--but to steal and make money.

Money and theft is their whole thing, in my opinion. I really don't think the main Bushwhacks and the powermongers behind them are ideologues. They couldn't care less about 'christian values' or our country and society. They are looters, on an unimaginable scale. There is evidence of this everywhere you look. But Katrina may sum it up best--they really didn't give a fuck, and couldn't be bothered to keep Americans safe, and saw that disaster, for instance, as another way for Halliburton & co. to drain our coffers. It exemplifies the gaping hole where their hearts should be, even on patriotism and the safety of our own people. And you recall how they wanted to sell our port facilities to the sheiks of the UAE. They even wanted to loot Social Security. Can you imagine where SS would be today, if they had privatized it, and tied it to the Stock Market? We would have millions of elderly starving to death. As it is, they've been borrowing against it, and against government pensions, to fund their corporate resource war, and line their pockets and their pals' pockets. It's all about MONEY. Every crime. Every policy. Every lie.

And so why wouldn't Guantanamo Bay be about that as well? Covering up their dreadful crimes. Making more money.

This may be why there are no records.

[KoKo]

13. Probably closer to the truth (what you say) than anything we will read from WaPo or NYT.

They covered their tracks well. And, notice the chumminess between Clintons and Bushies. I imagine there's much pressure on Obama to "go lightly." I don't know what many of us would do in his position. It will take years to track it all down if ever. But, that doesn't mean folks should stop the pressure. It's just that with eight years of Reagan, four of Poppy, eight of Clinton (being nice) and eight of Bush II....there's so much sealed, shredded or buried deep that it will take many years of responsible government and citizen digging to reveal even the half of it.

[glitch]

17. Agreed. Gitmo was part of the show while the real work of looting was done behind the scenes.

Plus torture is more about intimidating the citizens than anything else, according to what Naomi Klein learned from the Argentinians.

So here is your scary "show" for your money, to intimidate you, and to distract you about where your money is really going.

All con games have a cover story, they only need to look real they don't need to actually be real. I am sure the very real torture they just did for their own perverse amusement since they obviously weren't torturing for "intelligence".

Bush's new house in Texas is probably just where he's going to dump Laura (more "show"), he and Cheney are probably already heading to their bunkers.

[glitch]

18. Agreed. Gitmo was part of the show while the real work of looting was done behind the scenes.

Plus torture is more about intimidating the citizens than anything else, according to what Naomi Klein learned from the Argentinians.

So here is your scary "show" for your money, to intimidate you, and to distract you about where your money is really going.

All con games have a cover story, they only need to look real they don't need to actually be real. I am sure the very real torture they just did for their own perverse amusement since they obviously weren't torturing for "intelligence".

Bush's new house in Texas is probably just where he's going to dump Laura (more "show"), he and Cheney are probably already heading to their bunkers.

[ThomWV]

14. So the interrogations that saved cities, we have no record they ever happened?

[rucky]

15. I don't think the CIA & Pentagon will cooperate w/ the Obama Administration

unless he cleans house.

There are files. There has to be some paper trail that at least acknowledges the identities of the prisoners. I don't believe this for a minute.

[mopinko]

16. the files were shredded. that's how cheney hurt his back.

they learned not to give the job to fawn hall.

[Dennis Donovan]

19. Was it intentional or was it mismanagement?

I'm leaning towards "both."

[OhioChick]

21. K&R

:kick:

[Festivito]

22. Similar to the trashing of the White House lies Republicans told?

Three investigations turned up nothing. Why? Because, they asked for the documentation.

Republicans had no documentation, only memories in their minds. So, they had no documentation to turn over.

Three investigations.

No one asked, what they knew.

Are they hiding behind such a question now?