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The Bush administration may be dead and buried, but it is still capable of reaching out from the grave and surprising us silly.

The Washington Post reveals how deciding what to do with each Guantanamo detainee might take a good long while yet:

President Obama‘s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming 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. …

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.

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses.

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.

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We’ve held (and tortured) most of these detainees for seven years or so, not just without ever bringing charges in most cases, but without even bothering to assemble proper case files on them? Even for the Bush administration, that’s pretty incredible!

No wonder “incoming legal and national security officials (were) barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees”.

Remember how so many of these detainees have had what the Bush administration’s propaganda arm has been pleased to describe as judicial reviews by military tribunals? How criticisms that these reviews were just a kangaroo court sham were angrily dismissed as the terrorist-loving treason-talk of the Liberal Enemies of America? How, pray, does a military tribunal conduct any kind of judicial review without even a case file? (Especially given that most of these reviews didn’t involve testimony from witnesses, that decisions were claimed to be based entirely on the written record of each detainee’s case.)

Someone should compile a National Register of Shame. Everyone who went along with Bush administration travesties of justice like these (for example, every single military tribunal judge who handed down the verdicts that Bushworld had ordered up), and everyone who facilitated and went along with the Bush administration’s widespread trampling of civil liberties, should have their names duly inscribed in this National Register of Shame.

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Note that these “other former officials” and that “one former senior official” quoted at the end of the excerpt above don’t seem to be saying “Nonsense, there are case files!” They only seem to be saying: “So now you’re going to use this an an excuse for not being able to close Guantanamo in one year, huh?”

In fact, the basis of the former senior official’s dismissiveness is instructive. He has no first-hand knowledge of this situation, but people who have lied to us repeatedly before — about many different aspects of the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay — have given him assurances, and those are good enough for him.

…the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters … acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

So he actually doesn’t know what the bleep he’s talking about, but why should that prevent him from knowledgeably holding forth anyway? That, after all, is how the Bush administration ran the country for eight years.

And some former senior official has to make statements like these, so that Bush’s apologists and defenders — in Congress and outside — have something they can keep repeating in defense of Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld, and Tenet, and their various successors, heirs and assigns).