By GottaLaff
When you think of Bush, are you like me? Do you imagine him sitting on the floor, staring vacantly at floating dust particles, lost amidst a sea of Play-Doh, macaroni, crumpled bits of construction paper, and old photos of Roy Rogers and Hoppy, wishing he could be just like them?
I visualize his pathetic, limited world as messy, a virtual cacophony of vulgar, unformed thoughts, grandiose self-images, and the soundtrack of Looney Tunes playing in his hollow little head.
Bush's Gitmo filing system reflects my mental image:
[I]ncoming 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 the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.
But... wait for it... they blame Obama:
After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor.
For every accusation, there is a denial. Here are more accusations:
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. [...]
There have been indications from within and outside the government for some time, however, that evidence and other materials on the Guantanamo prisoners were in disarray, even though most of the detainees having been held for years. [...]
In another filing, the department said that [...] "None of the relevant agencies, however, was prepared to handle this volume of habeas [corpus] cases on an expedited basis."
Evidence gathered for military commission trials is in disarray, according to some former officials, who said military lawyers lacked the trial experience to prosecute complex international terrorism cases.
In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was "strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks."
He said he once accidentally found "crucial physical evidence" that "had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten."
.jpg)