Several media outlets have published stories on the latest raft of documents to be leaked, this time involving information on the hundreds of detainees that have been held at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The liberal British newspaper The Guardian focuses on the fact that many of the detainees held there were “flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds,” while The New York Times writes that the documents can be "mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum.” The Miami Herald’s epic chronicler of Gitmo, Carol Rosenberg, writes that efforts to glean information about the detainees were at times “comedic” as observers trying to determine whether detainees were actual terrorists were at times reduced to “drawing inferences from prisoners’ exercise habits.” Over the weekend, The Washington Post published the most comprehensive account thus far of how the administration failed in its political efforts to close Gitmo, in large part by bungling the politics and alienating stakeholders, particularly in Congress.
The politics of closing Guantanamo, and of preventing a further downward spiral into a more militarized, Kafkaesque national-security policy, have gotten even more difficult with the release of these documents than they were before. As Ben Wittes notes, these documents, many of which are poorly sourced, will provide ammunition to Republicans eager to reinforce the erroneous impression that the detainees are the “worst of the worst,” despite the fact that in many cases the evidence is so scant that the only thing still justifying their detention is the fear that they may ultimately turn out to be dangerous after all. While the administration has set up a detainee review board system that is more adversarial than its Bush-era predecessors, the easy access to raw, uncorroborated information about some of the remaining detainees may make them politically impossible to transfer.
In 2008, civil libertarians had several goals related to Guantanamo: closing the detention camp, ending torture, punishing those responsible, eliminating the military trial system, and ending indefinite detention. Only the second one has been achieved, and the U.S. ban on torture hangs on the flimsy thread of a single, reversible executive order. In 2011, the landscape is very different: Preventing Guantanamo from reopening for new detainees, stopping the militarization of domestic terrorism investigations, and circumventing the creation of a possible new Authorization to Use Military Force that would vastly expand the scope of the executive branch's powers are now key priorities. It's remarkable how much times have changed—rather than fighting to dismantle Bush-era precedents, civil-liberties groups are now trying to prevent the national security state from growing more lawless and unaccountable.
There's also an infuriatingly common story underlying this whole matter, the Bush administration's own careless approach to governance allows Republicans to claim political “vindication” as the problems they left behind prove difficult for their successors to fix. The Bush administration handled affairs at Gitmo so poorly that it was often misinformed about which detainees would be dangerous and which weren’t. Perceptions of the Bush administration’s “toughness” on national-security matters mistakes cruelty for effectiveness, as though their use of torture in interrogations could somehow make up for the absence of comprehensive case files on the so-called worst of the worst detained at Gitmo.
