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The internal documents from the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration's system for deciding detainees' guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released. Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture. Some people were released who later acted against the United States. Inmates who committed suicide were regarded only as a public relations problem. There are seriously dangerous prisoners at Guantanamo who cannot be released but may never get a real trial because the evidence is so tainted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The long legal story of the Bush administration's effort to prosecute detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, now has two fast-moving subplots. Either one could soon write something of a final chapter. One plot will proceed in a federal courthouse in Washington, where lawyers for a detainee filed papers on Thursday seeking an injunction that, if granted, could be the death knell for the Bush administration's military commissions at Guantanamo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]