When Chief Justice Roberts flubbed the Presidential oath of office — putting the word “faithfully” in the wrong place, saying “President to the United States” instead of “President of the United States” — I jokingly thought to myself that this might be the Bush administration’s final pot shot at Obama and the Democrats — trying to disrupt the symbolic power of the first African American taking that oath — or at the very least Roberts getting his revenge on Obama for voting against his appointment.
But I was wrong.
The flubbed administration of the oath of office isn’t going to be the final potshot by Bush II, and in fact some of the coming potshots will turn out to be much more like artillery fire. Witness this WaPo story:
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.
Steve Benen summarizes this situation as well as anyone I’ve read:
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.
…
But to put this in an even larger context, consider just how big a mess Bush has left for Obama here. The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who’ve been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren’t hard enough to clean up.
I wonder if Bush managed to misplace the nuclear football while in office, too. After all, when you’re so concerned with keeping the country safe from death and devastation, stupid insignificant things like keeping records and knowing what you’re doing to who — and why – simply fall by the wayside. Only a mindless bureaucracy-loving liberal would care about such trivial practices.
And after all, yes maybe Bush totally screwed up literally everything he touched, but didn’t Bush kept us safe from attack these last eight years? Doesn’t that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that one needn’t keep silly things like “records” or file “paperwork”?
The CIA sucks. This is preposterous. Obama clearly (and understandably) doesn’t want to spend his first year in office mired in the unpleasant task of investigating and punishing the prior administration for their willful imcompetance. The Bush Administration and the CIA are effectively daring the Obama Administration and Congress to let them off the hook — but the story above shows just how difficult it will be for Obama to “move forward.” Instead of putting forward positive plans for the future, the American people and their new representatives must, as a matter of patriotic duty, spend God knows how much time pointing to the unbelievable pile of excrement the Bush administration has left behind. It’s hard to believe Bush wasn’t deliberately trying to weaken this country. There is NO POSSIBLE EXCUSE for not keeping comprehensive records. This has nothing to do with being “conservative,” or a “hawk.” This has to do with behaving in a way that is either unbelievably destructive or unbelievably stupid. I’d like to put Bush hatred behind me, but he just won’t go away.
Comment by Ian — January 25, 2009 @ 9:55 pm
Ian, wasn’t Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta at Gitmo run by the DOD and not the CIA.
In any case, whomever was running it, there is no excuse for not keeping the records.
Comment by John — January 26, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
The Defense Department sucks also — or at least, the parts of the Defense Department responsible for maintaining records of detainees. I’m guessing the Defense Department justified not keeping appropriate records because they were under the impression that the CIA was responsible for keeping the records — but this is exactly the sort of issue that Congress and the Obama Administration now have to spend God knows how much time unravelling.
When it comes to Lee’s post, my disgust with the CIA was inspired by the line, “They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information.”
Reluctant to share information? With whom? Does the CIA work for the United States government? Or are they an independent entity? On what basis would they be “reluctant to share information” with the President of the United States?
Comment by Ian — January 26, 2009 @ 1:33 pm
Correction: In my last comment, I misstated the post, which said the CIA was “reluctant to share information” with Bush Administration officials, which is just as bizzare. I guess we’ll see if they’re more forthcoming now that Obama is president.
Comment by Ian — January 26, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
No, in the WaPo story one of the excuses offered for the lack of good records was supposedly that the CIA was reluctant to share information with people at Gitmo. Not the only reason that records weren’t kept, according to Bush, but one — one designed it seems to me to pass the blame off for their incompetence to the CIA.
Comment by Lee — January 26, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
So it may be that the people at Gitmo “ran” the prison, but it was the CIA that was supposedly responsible for handling the cases of the detainees there — at least according to the Gitmo people. Is it clear that the CIA is now reluctant to share information with the people running Gitmo under Barack Obama? Or were they only reluctant to share information with the Gitmo folks while Bush was president?
Comment by Ian — January 26, 2009 @ 6:07 pm
Here’s another relevant excerpt from the WaPo article:
“Charles D. “Cully” Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases. Threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee were often required, he said, to persuade the CIA to “cough up a sentence or two.”
“A second former Pentagon official said most individual files are heavily summarized dossiers that do not contain the kind of background and investigative work that would be put together by a federal prosecution team. He described “regular food fights” among different parts of the government over information-sharing on the detainees.”
So the people with whom the CIA allegedly wouldn’t share info were in Bush’s Defense Dept.
Comment by Ian — January 26, 2009 @ 6:15 pm