No Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Files
The Washington Post reports that the Barack Obama administration has run into a major problem: there are no comprehensive files about Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Team Obama searched for these files in order to assess the danger posed by every individual suspect and to design an individual plan for every detainee. Since the files do not exist, at least not according to Obama officials, it is difficult to release suspects and / or to come up with ways to move them so that the prison camp can be closed as Obama ordered last week.
Some former Bush officials say that the files do exist but that Team Obama is simply looking for excuses not to close Guantanamo Bay any time soon due to the complexity of the issue. They believe that Obama et alia realize that closing Gitmo requires a more nuances approach than they anticipated, meaning they will take it slow. Since the liberal wing of the Democratic Party will not accept any delay, however, Team Obama has come up with the ‘no files exist’ excuse.
Other former Bush officials, however, agree that comprehensive files do indeed not exist. They told the WaPo that different agencies have assembled different information about the same suspects and are reluctant to share the information with each other. This means that Team Obama has to collect all available information, review it, put it together in separate files and then use it to design plans for every individual detainee. Such a process will take many months to complete.
It is interesting that the Bush administration believed it had the right to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely, without assembling a comprehensive file on them. The administration itself may not have known why specific individuals were detained, why they weren’t brought to justice, and why they posed a danger to the United States.
In any case, the above means that Obama will have to take his time with both closing Gitmo and with deciding what to do about the prison’s detainees. 60 of them are considered too dangerous for release. The rest can be set free, the question is where and when. Will they be brought back to the country in which they were captured, or their own native country, or will the U.S. accept (some of) them?
If what the Bush officials say is true, what happened to all the dismantling of “the wall” between law enforcement and intelligence? Was it that significantly reinstated when Patriot Act II was passed? I didn’t think the changes were all that significant in the second version to affect this. Some things were removed but many were kept.