Non Habeas Corpus

Sure, we have these people locked up already, so who cares about building a case against them. Or, y'know, keeping records about them:

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.

Which, I suppose, leads one to wonder exactly how they knew these people were evil terrorist illegal enemy islamofascist non-human pond scum. If there weren't any records being kept, or for that matter being collected. How did they do reviews and inventories to make sure that all the cases were properly overseen? That their judgment in each case was correct? How did they even know who they were dealing with?

But lest we forget, these were "very bad people". Terrorists and bombers and "responsible for 9-11". Man, they really locked up some perverters of democracy. Good going, guys.

Which reminds me of something William Gibson said, back at the end of the halcyon days of the first Bush administration.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

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Oh, completely unrelated - a really weird Google ad in this article:

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