Good enough for government work

The Department of Justice is seriously contemplating holding a completely new series of Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearings for every prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. In fact, it has petitioned the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to extend a deadline to finish these hearings. That sounds like a good thing, right? The original hearings didn't grant many rights to the defendants and much of the evidence was based on torture. Did the government have a change of heart and want to start over with a clean slate?

I can't even write that with a straight face. No, of course that is not the reason.

Thus, in a petition filed last Friday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the DoJ argues that it cannot possibly comply with the federal appeals court's order of last July to turn over this evidence. Reasoning: 1) Disclosure could "seriously disrupt the Nation's intelligence-gathering programs" and cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security." No surprise there. But it also argues that 2) the information used against the detainees at the CSRTs "is not readily available, nor can it be reasonably recompiled."

Or as Slate puts it: My dog ate my evidence. As if it weren't bad enough that the government went out of its way to circumvent the Constitution in detaining these men in perpetuity without charge, but now we have the icing on the cake - bureaucratic incompetence.

I should be more upset about this, but I am too fatigued from every other outrageous thing the Bush Administration has said or done recently. But there you have it. The evidence used to keep people in Guantanamo is so slipshod, they have literally misplaced it.