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Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray
President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fate 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.
So one can't just snap one's fingers and close the place. Who knew?
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 the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and 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 conclusions 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," the former official said. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

Obama officials said that they want to make their own judgments. "The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable," another senior official said. But "it's clear that we can't clear up this issue overnight" partly because the files "are not comprehensive."
That's just an excuse. Whether the files are all in one place or not, the basic issues are known and have been known since George Bush ordered the detainees to Guantanamo in the first place:

1) What do you do with foreign nationals who are illegal combatants captured in the field?
2) If you let them live, how do you house and feed them? And where?
3) Can you detain them indefinitely? If so, where? If not, why not?
4) If you don't want to detain them indefinitely, how do you decide who to keep and who to release?
5) What if a detainee's country of origin doesn't want him?
6) What if a detainee's country of origin does want him for the purpose of torture?

The Bush administration worked diligently trying to solve these problems. They went to the appropriate Congressional oversight committees frequently over the last seven years and when committee members complained about one problem or another, the Bush team responded. And we had not one but two comprehensive Congressional bills passed, both with bipartisan support, only to see both overturned by a Supreme Court that couldn't itself provide any meaningful guidance.

Whether one is Republican or Democrat, it is nonsense to claim that the Bush administration was somehow irresponsible in addressing the issues. The Obama people know this because they're not stupid. So everything in this article is eyewash.

Posted by: Steve White 2009-01-25
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=260708