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”?