The sorry case of the Guantanamo case files

It’s all about government records over there in North America. New President Obama’s blackberry and tech-savvy white house staff are filling the news. So too is his prompt executive order on Presidential Records, a thumbs up to the public’s right to know and a warning for future wannabe megalomaniacal, secretive, vice presidents. Obama also announced that Guantanamo will be closed. Here too, government records are of primary interest, as an article from the Washington Post shows.

The article, Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray, describes a confused state of affairs as to the discoverability of comprehensive case files on individuals detained at Guantanamo. Officials have reportedly found that files are incomplete, physically and virtually spread between offices, don't contain the right sort of information, and that the responsibility for creating and maintaining them is shared by several departments who, by the way, don’t talk to each other. This is only sort of denied by members of the CIA and Defence Department. To me this raises the question: what role did Guantanamo Officials perceive for the case files they were creating?

This is a very serious concern. Was Guantanamo set up to collect evidence from suspected terrorists so that these individuals could be brought to trial? In this scenario the case files they compiled would be of the utmost importance. They would hold the data that would allow the US government, presumably, to thwart future terrorist acts and (leaving aside for the moment the problematic (non-)reliability of evidence obtained under duress) to legally prosecute those responsible.

The WP’s article reports that “former Bush administration officials…said that…the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority”. Detention and interrogation for their own sake overshadowed the creation and accumulation of documentary evidence that could be used to safeguard the country? What went wrong here? I’m alarmed that the US government not only felt able to have such a poor attitude toward the creation of these case files, but also that they’ve gotten away with it.