Remember, There Were No Files

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_01/021810.php#more

REMEMBER, THERE WERE NO FILES.... Bloomberg ran a story yesterday that's been generating quite a bit of attention, especially among conservatives. The report, citing government data, claims that as many one in five detainees released from Guantanamo Bay "are suspected of or confirmed to have engaged in terrorist activity after their release." For the right, this obviously become another reason not to close the detention facility.

If the report is accurate there's a relevant question that shouldn't go overlooked: when were these detainees released? Or, more specifically, were they all released by Bush/Cheney?

A senior Obama administration official told Greg Sargent this morning just that -- the recidivists exist, but most, if not all, were released by the former administration.

He claimed that the administration doesn't believe that any of the detainees released under Obama have gone into terror-related activity -- because the Obama administration has a better screening process in place to determine which detainees pose a threat.

The story in question involves a new and classified Pentagon report that says roughly one-fifth of released detainees are suspected or confirmed to have returned to terrorist activity — up from a lower estimate in April.

But the senior official says the report shouldn't reflect badly on Obama policy. "We have been presented with no information that suggests that any of the detainees transferred by this administration have returned to the fight," the official says.

The official suggested that the possibility that all the recidivists were released under Bush shows that the previous administration didn't do the work of screening detainees slated for release that the Obama administration is doing.

At first blush, this might seem hard to believe. For an Obama administration official to just blame Bush/Cheney for the whole mess probably even seems self-serving.

But given what we know, it seems entirely plausible that detainees released by Bush/Cheney returned to terrorist activities, while detainees released by Obama didn't. Why? Because we learned about a year ago that Bush/Cheney didn't keep files on the detainees.

Immediately upon taking office, President Obama and his team began a process that would review the case files for every detainee. The new administration found, however, that the Bush gang didn't keep files.

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.

This seems hard to believe. Even Bush/Cheney critics might think, "Those guys were incompetent, but they weren't that incompetent."

But they actually were. 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.

These misjudgments were common because the Bush administration just didn't keep very good track of who they had in custody -- even on those who'd been imprisoned for several years.

When Obama created the Guantanamo Review Task Force, the new president and his team were effectively starting from scratch, compiling information that should have been pulled together years ago. The review, however, made it a lot less likely that Obama would make the same mistakes Bush made, and makes it far more likely that terrorists who were released from Gitmo came from Bush/Cheney, not Obama.

—Steve Benen

[DevonRex]

1. Wow, Bush/Cheney incompetence continues to boggle the mind.

In a way it's a good thing that the Obama administration had to start from scratch, though. Because they certainly couldn't trust ANYTHING that was compiled under W.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. Wow is right

Now may I suggest perhaps the reason for no files is to hide what they didn't want the American people to find out?

Nah, that's just silly. Right?

[DevonRex]

3. Heh.

:P

[Cha]

4. I don't think anyone has even calculated yet

how much the bushcheney gang fubared everything they touched during their hold on the government.

[Igel]

5. It's an argument that'll bite you on the behind.

I note that shortly before Xmas a spokesman for the administration was quoted on the record saying that they were going to release more Yemenis--and this was deemed almost universally to be a good thing.

Then they said that they really didn't want to release them, but there was a court order and all.

Then a few days after Xmas another spokesman said that weeks earlier they'd reconsidered releasing Yemenis and had not only not decided to release more Yemenis, they'd actually decided *not* to release Yemenis. (So the "we're going to release them" statement occurred after the retroactive "we're not going to release them" decision.)

The current stance, IIRC ("if I read correctly"), is that Yemen doesn't have sufficient infrastructure to support their release, although things haven't really changed there for the last 6 months (much longer than that, actually). Of course, this is both a point of pride and of regret, depending on who's doing the listening.

In other words, the "truth" of pre-Xmas policy is entirely a fluid thing. The future's not hard to predict--it's the past that's hard to predict (to paraphrase an old Soviet quip).

That strikes me as the protean position of a lot of people. Under *, they argued the detainees were innocent, that they should be let go if you can't prove guilt in a civilian court--as though evidenciary rules yielded truth instead of being a kludge to balance civil rights against punishment. When Sa'udis exited their rehab program and went jihadi the response was that they'd been radicalized in Gitmo (with the evidence that those who lied to their parents, taken their savings and travelled 600 or more miles to attend an AQ training camp evidence of being good pacifist Sufis, I'd assume). Now many of the same people argue that the detainees were always dangerous and shouldn't have been let go.

The problem isn't that they've changed their opinion over time. If you're confronted with new facts and can't be adult enough to change your opinion then your opinion's fairly worthless as an opinion--it's a belief. The problem is that the opinion that they hold and have always firmly held, their immutable opinion, seems to be easily changed to meet the political needs of the minute.

[uponit7771]

6. The Bush admin was a total fuck up!!!