Closing Guantanamo gets complicated

Well here's a surprise. Obama has authorized the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison that the Bush Administration has used to illegally imprison people from around the world on charges of terrorism -- without due process, without trials, and without proof of committing a crime in some cases. The Obama Administration is now looking into each and every case -- an exercise they were barred from doing until Obama became president. What have they found?

[They've] discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them [the 245 prisoners].

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.

Oh, and it gets worse. It appears that Bush's political appointees still within the bureaucracy, are doing their darnest to make sure that no progress is made in order to cause the new administration to fail.

I think some flogging is probably in order.