Well, there you are. The entire concept of individual adjudications of anything was tossed by George W. Bush (as channeled by David Addington) who declared that Geneva Convention Article 5 combatant status hearings were not necessary because the President had declared everyone “an enemy combatant,” then (and still) an unrecognized status apparently made up by Mr. Addington (and his partner in perfidy… and incompetence… Douglas Feith).

And it seems, the years-long drumbeat and repetition of “worst of the worst,” “worst of the worst” has had its desired effect: even the Bush Obama Administration apparently believes its own bulls***, as its “executive review” languishes on, simultaneously purporting to “clear” men on the one hand while the Justice Department fights tooth and nail to continue holding the very same men, the State Dept. purports to be “negotiating to resettle” while the Defense Dept. continues to release Bush era propaganda about “terrorists returning to the battlefield” and “worst of the worst” seemingly designed to scare off foreign governments from admitting them!

And quite frankly, everyone is left to ponder quite what “the rule of law” means anyway when habeas corpus petitions are granted 29 times (against only 7 denials, and these, of course, only because the government had any evidence at all of any connection no matter how tenuous to the Taliban, rather than to al Qaeda let alone the 9-11 plot), and most of those 29 men remain imprisoned at Guantanamo,,, potentially for the rest of their lives… habeas petitions granted or denied alike!

The Bush Obama Administration continues to tell us about its preference for “the rule of law” (over the preference of its predecessor) even when it’s showing the same squeamishness of courts that we have become used to lo these 8 years.

And quite frankly, the Bush Obama Administration’s misguided plan to propose preventive detention rather than risk giving up the political expediency of actually taking its lumps and releasing the 80-90% completely innocent men it is holding (including dropping its galling insistence that men from Yemen who admitedly have no connection to terrorism whatsoever must enter Saudi style “reeducation” programs lest they pose “security threats”) is just too bitter a gall to even try to swallow.

As someone who was in downtown New York on the morning of 11 Sept. 2001, as I am most mornings to this day, I can safely say that the combination of OBL and Zawahari (not to mention their harborer Mullah Omar) running around free while hundreds of nobodies were, instead, trotted before us to serve as the collective scapegoat, while the same event was used to justify the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the ghost prisons, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, torture, warrantless spying on citizens… is God damned close to comical. If the joke weren’t on those of us not in the ruling elite, of course. But the joke is on us, people. Not to in any way minimize terrorism (which unlike most, I got to see up close myself), but the cure we have been prescribed has been, and will be, far more toxic than the supposed disease.