I’ve always assumed that the Bush Administration’s competency extended as far as their priorities and interests. Disaster recovery, for instance, wasn’t terribly high on George W. Bush’s “to-do” list, and as such, the administration didn’t do much to prepare for a minor disaster, much less a catastrophe like Katrina. Since the Bush folks seemed pretty intent on violating the Constitution and our various treaty obligations, I sort of just assumed that they did a pretty decent job of it. As it turns out though, the Bush Administration’s incompetency extended to everything, including their twisted enthusiasm for torture and indefinite detention (via the Washington Post):
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. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.
It is – literally – Monty Python meets Franscisco Franco: stunning incompetence combined with an almost casual disregard for decency. But, this is exactly what happens when you entrust government to a collection of small-minded, petty authoritarians.
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