This New Yorker piece on recent Wikileaks documents on Guantanamo brilliantly summarizes the Bush — and now Obama — detention policy:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

The Obama administration’s official justification for continuing to hold detainees without charge or trial is not a new phenomenon. “Too dangerous to release, but too difficult to prosecute” is likely to be history’s most commonly used excuse for suspension of habeas corpus. That detainees could serve as future confidants (among other strange reasons) has not come into the fray until now.

Unfortunately, predictable bipartisanship in Washington means that neither party is demanding an explanation for suspending habeas appeals.