In a Slate Magazine article entitled The Dog Ate My Evidence (Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2007), Dahlia Lithwick reports that the US DOJ has filed pleadings which state that the information used against the detainees at the CSRTs is not readily available, and cannot be "reasonably recompiled."

Dahlia Lithwick writes: 

"Is the government taking the position that this evidence is both critically, vitally, and hugely important to national security, but also, um, lost? Not quite. But it is saying that the "record" relied upon to lock up men for years is somehow so scattered among various Department of Defense "components, and all relevant federal agencies" that it cannot be pulled together for a review. This claim—a version of "the dog ate our record"—is triply sickening in light of the fact that some of the detainees at Gitmo have reportedly undergone not one, not two, but three CSRTs, because the Pentagon kept demanding that they be retried over and over again until they were found guilty."

"My problem here is not just that everything we now know about the evidence used against many of the detainees at Guantanamo suggests that they tended to lay blame on one another after multiple rounds of torture. My worry is that secret evidence that is obtained illegally is not just a Gitmo phenomenon anymore. There is no doubt that the same kinds of flimsy claims that put away folks at Guantanamo have supported massive dragnets against American citizens as well. A regime of recklessly overutilized administrative subpoenas known as national security letters and widespread government eavesdropping means that the same sorts of thin factual records that built these seemingly airtight cases against the "enemy combatants," are also building up the record against the rest of us."

Read the full article here on slate.com