Let's call them incompetent, stupid and evil, because to call them merely shallow and small makes it seem they were almost human. In fact, they were monsters.

They have the Soviets beat all hollow.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch,"

I'm trying to understand what this even means, but I'm guessing they weren't scattered among career employees.

Plausible deniability gone amok?

No one should be surprised that the GTMO case files are a mess.

This administration has literally been incompetent--across the board.

Brought to us by the same folks who botched 9/11, Katrina, the anthrax investigation, Iraq, etc. etc.

Why would they need files and data? They KNEW these were "terrorists" so what would they need to know?

Notice how the media still assumes this - that if someone is in Gitmo that they are (as one writer put it) "guilty of whatever it is they have not been charged with."

Incompetence is not the word I would use to describe the Gitmo files. Having sat on the detainee review board in Iraq and seeing the files there, I cannot believe the file mess at Gitmo unless it was intentionally done that way. Conspiracy theorists might say it was done intentionally to avoid possible prosecution of detainees or officials at Gitmo. Only time and availability of information will let us know the reasons for the mess.

The scope and breadth of the Bush Administration's incompetence is truly breath taking.

It sounds like they were a bunch of poor students who hardly knew where they had put their schoolwork.

Almost goes without saying that failing to keep comprehensive files on each prisoner in Gtmo arguably hurt our national security a very great deal. And prosecution was low on their list of priorities? They were planning on keeping people detained forever without ever trying them and, more importantly, without even knowing why.

I think this reveals (once again...) that the Bush & Co were motivated by domestic political-- rather than legal or military or economic or whatever-- motives. The prisoners at Guantanamo were just pieces on the domestic political chessboard. Actual information about them was an unnecessary distraction.

I've taken over jobs before where the previous people where just milking it and running a project into the ground. It's a headache and a half to walk into. The client just wants it fixed. In my line of work, after everything is fixed, the client goes after the former contractor and sicks the lawyers on them for punitive and any possible criminal charges. In this case, the U.S. citizens are the client. I see no reason why things should be different here.

My capacity for outrage and shock has surely been diminished over the years of malfeasance by the Bush Administration, but this I find astonishing.

How could any system to deal with these detainees even begin to dispense justice without a single, comprehensive file on each of them?

MattF is right. This is just one more piece of evidence that whatever it was that motivated Guantanamo and the rest, a desire to see justice done wasn't part of it.

And yet the panel on Chris Matthews this morning (Fineman, Woodward, Kelly O'Donnell) were unanimous that Americans don't want to investigate these abuses. It's not the way to reach across the aisle. Someone please remind me when Republicans openly admitted they supported the illegal interrogation techniques. They all seem to be pretty sure illegal actions will be found.

I think what Brad DeLong says fits here: The Bush administration is worse than you imagine possible, even after you take account of the fact that it is worse than you imagine possible

It seems the Republicans are advocating keeping these people, who have no charges filed against them, and for which there is no evidence of any wrong-doing, in Gitmo for the rest of their lives. Why the attempt to squash any remedy for what has been allowed to happen to these human beings? Why are the Republicans so afraid of Gitmo?

This shouldn't be news. When the Muslim chaplain James Yee was arrested for supposedly removing confidential files on his laptop computer, he and his attorney learned months later, while preparing for trial, that the prosecution didn't even know what these "confidential" files were, because they hadn't yet bothered to examine the contents of Yee's hard drive. Of course, everyone knows that Yee's real crime was exposing abuses and arguing for more respectful treatment of the prisoners, but couldn't they even have trumped up their phony charges more competently?

How could this happen? - Mr. Benen

Well kept files = reviewable paper trail = War Crimes Trials.

Case closed.

Colleen: It seems the Republicans are advocating keeping these people, who have no charges filed against them, and for which there is no evidence of any wrong-doing, in Gitmo for the rest of their lives. Why the attempt to squash any remedy for what has been allowed to happen to these human beings? Why are the Republicans so afraid of Gitmo?

A possible hint can be found in Robert Kaplan's piece in this month's Atlantic Monthly, "Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma":

"If we act like angels, and another, even more massive attack occurs in the United States, then the public might cry for blood, as it did to an extent in the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, when torture was occasionally spoken of in different terms than it is now. Remember that some Bush Administration policies were drawn up in the context of one public mood, and carried out in the context of another. Were that to happen, detainees’ rights might decline by, say, 50 percent. But if we push the envelope only 15 percent along that dangerous path, then we might avoid the 50 percent trap, and save many of our own lives."

In other words, if we allow a little fascism now - 15 percent, in fact - we might prevent more fascism from coming down the pike later. Or something.

There are no files? WTF? If that's true, then how did the "actionable intelligence" tortured out of these people that Bush claims was used to thwart terrorist attacks get into the hands of the people who executed arrests?

The more I hear about activities of the Bush adminstration, the more I think that the Bush adminstration was simply evil, not incompetent, not careless, not even immoral or ammoral, evil.

The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

Apparently, despite Republican scare tactics, other countries are, in fact, willing to take Gitmo prisoners -- for Obama where they wouldn't for Bush. Today Switzerland announced it would consider taking them 'if it would help in getting Gitmo closed' and, apparently Portugal made the same declaration.

If you've ever watched a caper movie, you know the thieves rely on a certain amount of misdirection to cover their tracks. I won't assert that every complication President Obama will encounter as he attempts to move forward is deliberately planned. But I will assert that numerous messes have been made deliberately in order to keep President Obama (or whichever Democrat would next take on the office) from moving forward.

These people are not incompetent. They have done what they set out to do. They compromised what they set out to compromise, broke what they set out to break, and stole what they set out to steal. A decade - if not a generation - of cleanup and damage control was very much part of the strategy.

Monsters roamed the capital for the last 8 years. The only closure for our nation is to hunt the monsters down, and bring them to Justice.
I can only hope.

This is not terribly surprising. Its fundamentally all like the imprisonment of hostile Indian warriors and Indian leaders during the Settlement. The true charge under which those Indians were imprisoned was extralegal, i.e. being an impediment to designs on their property and violently upsetting to Settlers. In short, they were terrorists.

The Administration desire at Guantanamo was, like in the forts in which Indians were jailed, for most of the detainees to die there without the embarrassment of having to put them before a kangaroo court and have the travesties involved documented. So the place was set up and run to encourage suicides and people to die of environmental and artificially enhanced medical and psychological stresses. Subtle sadisms, pretty much.

And for a time the detainees complied as desired, i.e. a lot turned suicidal under the regimen. And quite a few apparently died under the imposed stresses. Then came the public exposure of the place.

I can't say it better or more succinctly then Matt F, so I'll just repeat his wonderful right-on comment:

I think this reveals (once again...) that the Bush & Co were motivated by domestic political-- rather than legal or military or economic or whatever-- motives. The prisoners at Guantanamo were just pieces on the domestic political chessboard. Actual information about them was an unnecessary distraction.

For an outfit that loves to wiretap EVERYBODY ESPECIALLY JOURNALISTS, I find the lack of case files strange.

When fear is your platform you release those who you know will do harm to perpetuate the fear your platform is based on. When those you've released go out and do scary things then it makes the innocent ones you are holding captive seem more frightening.

I can't believe liberals still give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt by saying they were stupid and small. Everything they did was done by design and it was intended to allow their corruption to go unnoticed by using terrorism as a distraction.

This will never, ever make it to cable news.

Yeah, the Liberals would have us complete a five page form in triplicate anytime we do so much as ask them their names. And of course, after that we should offer them therapy to discover their inner goodness.

They scattered the coals, hoping a fire wouldn't start.

Hope is famously not a plan.
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"Yeah, the Liberals would have us complete a five page form in triplicate anytime we do so much as ask them their names. And of course, after that we should offer them therapy to discover their inner goodness."

There really aren't words to express how pathetic...how utterly asinine this post is.....

Another Republican who can only fight strawmen....please....you lost....go away and leave sensible Americans alone.

And of course, after that we should offer them therapy to discover their inner goodness.

We might want to learn why other human beings would spend their lives plotting mayhem, so we could interrogate them for that as well. However, for our domestic terrorists who created Gitmo, we won't bother looking for any inner goodness. We'll just prosecute them for the felonies they committed, then let them rot forever.

Hey, I hear we have a spiffy prison in Cuba...

Hilzoy didn't "report" on this.

Hilzoy linked to a report on this. And didn't bother crediting the writer/reporter.

Stop biting the hand that feeds you.

Didn't have files? Yeah, right. More like, don't have the files any more.

The ex-Nixonistas know better than not to destroy the evidence.

I want the Crawford "ranch" expropriated by the federal government and plots of land given to every Gitmo prisoner who isn't charged with a crime. That will do me.

Crawford, and I hear his new house in Dallas is good sized. I'm sure Laura won't mind sharing. And what's Dick's new undisclosed location?

There are various "made in Washington" ways to cover one's tracks.

Nixon used the "deletion" strategy. Hillary used the "misfiled" (or something like that) approach. Richard Clarke, on behalf of Bill Clinton, invented the "surreptitious removal" tactic, coupled with "accidental discard" with a dose of forgetfulness. Of these, the last one is particularly hard to pull off. Then there is the age-old "take one for the team" approach employed by the Libby/Cheney combo.

And now we have the ingenious"bureaucratic 52-card pickup" angle, also known as "burial UNDER the skeletons in the closet".

What next?

She didn't report on shit. The WP did.

That's why I was in wheelchair. Sprained my back on those durn files tryin to spread them around.

I know people don't like hearings, but a number of Bush people have some 'splaining to do. Guantamo is one of the biggest national security disasters in our nation's history, and this level of incompentence/malfeasance has to be brought to account.

Just because you leave office shouldn't mean you never have to explain what you did during those years.

They have the Soviets beat all hollow.

Oh, please. Stalin killed tens of millions. Bush/Cheney was bad, but not that bad. Not even close. We're still pampered here compared to those who lived under the Soviet regime.

Folks, The Blame seems to go back to Bush/Cheney for the entire mess.

Well, yes the buck stops at the top.

However, when you have Intelligence Organizations that on a good day refuse to agree, that control a lions share of the information and of which a large majority is Classified so high that even The President sometimes has trouble seeing it. That my friends is the receipe for disaster.

Plus for those of you that do not understand this, I will give you somewhat of a break.

It is not even remotely like the secrets your parents kept from you as a child. At least those you figured out over time.

These are secrets that if divulged would kill an agent or cause a source of information to disappear. That my friends is what classifies information.

Now after the case where a CIA Agent was outted by the Administration Early in the first term, Why would you think that either or any of the three letter organizations is going to cooperate???? HMMMMM!!!!!

Forget it. The Trust was broken. The Faith is gone. The Organizations are Keeping the Faith with the Rank and File. So why are there no Files or Information????

This is a Monster created out of shear stupidity and lack of foresight by the Administration while in office. They did it too themselves.

Then these same organizations were held out to dry after the agent was outted for nothing less than lying to the public and supposedly giving false informations about WMD's.

Need I say more.

Sending the Gitmo prisoners to Switzterland or Portugal isn't really going to help them. They need to go HOME. KERA (public tv) had a show on some Chinese Muslims last night who ended up in Albania from Gitmo with no way home because their gov considers them terrorists. EIGHT years from their homes because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. So no files, no hope, no nothing. Obama has a big job just to take care of this.