May this dismal list of John Does be the beginning of a similar process as you have so much helped to start and develop for Guantanamo.
For every single one of these names hides a human being, who for heaven knows how long has been abused, degraded, tortured, deprived of his humanity. A human being with a family, a wife, kids, siblings, parents, who often do not even know why he has disappeared and whether he still is alive.

The ‘crime’ of most of them was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or to be sold for a bounty (5.000 USD is a fortune for many; foreign armies pay 2.000 for each civilian they kill).
But even if there is one who has been a cook (sic) in a taliban camp, even if heaven forbid one threw a grenade at a US convoy (are we in an active war zone, or aren’t we ?), can that ever be an excuse for a supposedly civilised and democratic government to deny these men and boys any rights, except those to suffer and die ?

When will the US government and its allies finally understand that their thirst for revenge does not contribute to making the world a safer place, on the contrary ?

For the majority of the thousands of names on this and other prisoner lists, not to mention those who never even made it to any list at all, are primarily victims of that most primitive of emotions : revenge. Revenge for the fact that someone dared to attack the US, revenge as a strategy -for lack of more constructive ideas-, revenge not on those responsible for 9/11 but on anyone defenceless enough to be destroyed without raising international outrage. Not much is needed for that : to be a muslim, not to be white, not to be rich and powerful enough to bail oneself out.

Revenge is a despicable emotion when guiding individuals, but an outright criminal one when guiding -supposedly democratic- governments. And most of all, an entirely counter-productive one, as the plight of innocent victims will motivate scores of fanatics to take up arms, precisely, in revenge.

PS : a few -mostly rhetoric- questions :
- Wonder why the list suddenly changes from 4.000′s to 20.000′s ?
A new bookkeeper ?
- And who might nbr 459 be, Gul Zaman, who judging from his low serial number managed to survive his ordeal since the very beginning of Bagram prison ?
- Which of the missing numbers was Dilawar’s, who was tortured to death there, for the ‘fun’ of hearing him scream ‘God !’ after each blow ?
- And what is the definition of an ‘Active War Zone’ ??? It’s not like the bullets and rockets are flying so densily around Bagram, that there could not be a commission that would screen incoming prisoners and the veracity of the accusations (if any ?) raised against them. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall hearing of bullets or rockets in that region at all, apart from the odd IED [Improvised Explosive Device], like anywhere else.
And -as argued before- detaining a random innocent person will not in any way contribute to ‘keeping dangerous extremists of the street’, but might incite those who so far were neutral, to take up arms.

Andy:

Thanks for that; obviously, the first step is to be depressed. And then, of course, I intend to simply republish the list, before it disappears down the memory hole as so many other things have.

I suppose the “good news” is that it looks like even the normally-bordering-on-Fascist D.C. Circuit may find a way to narrowly recognize habeas rights at Bagram, which would be just a wee bit of law in an otherwise-fully-intended-to-be-lawless-zone. The Obama Admin. (a/k/a George W. Bush’s third term) might moot the damned thing by running the place as a transparent POW camp. As if! Its defense is actually a confession: frankly, admitting Bagram is in a “dangerous” war zone, where, for example, it might come under fire, might itself be a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, kind of like Abu Ghraib, because these things are supposed to be locating it out of harm’s way… rather than its use as yet another legal black hole. But the fact is, if the Gov’t insists on renditioning foreign nationals to places that aren’t their home country (Afghanistan and Iraq present other problems, but it is at least “traditional” for an invading/occupying power to hold prisoner/nationals in the same country)… then the Gov’t– not Tina Foster or Judge John Bates– but the U.S.A. Gov’t itself– would be extending habeas to any military base anywhere it chose to engage in such behavior.

Anyway, great work as always. I suppose that with this legal wedge there, there will be more requests for data on, say, nationality and the supposed “CSRT” equivalent data, and the way these things work, it’s going to come out.