If there are still any folks in the Obama Administration who don't think it's advisable to investigate war crimes on the part of your predecessor, guess again: this story in today's Post renders such an investigation not only advisable, but necessary.
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 . . .
In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was "strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks."
He said he once accidentally found "crucial physical evidence" that "had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten."
Why necessary? Because this finally puts to rest the concept that the Bush administration was the least bit interested in seeing terror suspects brought to justice, or even paying lip service to it. No executive department or individual was put in charge of gathering or collating evidence against suspects; no one was assigned the responsibility of coordinating evidence between agencies; no one, it appears, was even assigned the duty of building prosecutable cases against a number of suspects who were detained without charge for years.
And why did this happen? Because they didn't care. Repeat after me: They didn't fucking care. The Global War on Terror™, like every other stage-managed promotion of the Bush era, was not about adherence to legal precedent, or even about results. It was about the appearance of results and the illusion of legality. There were no plans in place to bring dozens of terror suspects to the bar of justice because the Bush people had no intention of ever showing them there. They would be tortured at Gitmo for as long as the torturers could hope to get away with it; then the suspects would either be rendered to secret prisons for more torture, or repatriated to their home countries under cover of darkness when they had outlived their usefulness.
And this is why Attorney General Holder must appoint a special war crimes investigator: Because we now know by the Bushies' complete indifference to legal processes that the sadistic behavior that was condoned at Gitmo was the end in itself, not a means to an end. The last legal fig leaf has been plucked away. There's no more time for excuses, and those of us who care in the least for our Constitutional rule of law should be willing to add our voices to the host of fellow citizens who refuse to be silent until a war crimes investigation is at the very least convened.
---Vitelius
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