Incompetent

Well, this is stunning but completely unsurprising in its way:

Upon announcing his plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama also began a process that would review the case files for every detainee. The problem for the new administration, however, is that there are no files.
[The Obama team] 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.

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.

The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who've been in U.S. custody for several years.

I don't really know what to say about this sort of thing. It's really just so emblematic of the overall Bush administration's general incompetence. Bush and his team always valued ideology over ability. They spent so much time fighting to push the boundaries of executive power, they gave no thought to the basic nuts and bolts of prosecution. We all know that Bush just intended to keep them all in prison forever without ever charging the detainees. That was more or less his averred plan. But given the military commissions act, given that they did sort through the detainees and release quite a number of people, given the international attention that Gitmo drew, you would think they would have had some sort of systematic process for collecting and reviewing all the data on each of the "baddest of the bad guys" at Gitmo. But no, instead they lost most of the physical evidence and had the data strewn around various agencies, databases, and in piles on departed prosecutors' desks.

John Cole said it well: the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things.