Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Obama officials try to find Gitmo files:
The article says that the paper spoke to "several former Bush administration officials" who "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." But then they quote one of the most absurd denials I've ever heard:
After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.
"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.
Yeah, that's a denial that should be taken seriously. An anonymous former official in an unknown capacity has a politically convenient explanation asserting that the Obama folks are inventing this as an excuse, yet he admits that he's never actually seen those files himself and he's just going on the word of the Pentagon. Never mind the several highly decorated JAG officers who have resigned as prosecutors and said that they were refused access to exculpatory evidence and that the evidence that they were allowed to see was fragmentary and often based on anonymous sources or on coerced or bribed testimony.
A counter-source that can not openly assert his name, his position, and then claims he no source of knowledge not already presented elsewhere in the article (and accounted for in the original claim), is a useless source.
Yet another sign that "he-said-she-said" in the only thing "journalists" seem able to write anymore.
That's not objective journalism, that's being a lazy shit.
Our Constitutional Right to the Freedom of the Press deserves better than the Press we're getting these days...
