One of the hot topics now a days is government power to track people and detain them and suspend the normal rules and so forth. The thing is that the rules aren't there to protect people from government, they are also there to keep government running smoothly. In the latest twist of the prisoner abuse story, top Washington administrators keep prisoners "off the books," and apparently then forget that the prisoners exist!

The New York Times > Washington > Prison Abuse: Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq:
"WASHINGTON, June 16 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.
. . .
Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse.
'Once he was placed in military custody, people lost track of him,' a senior intelligence official conceded Wednesday night. 'The normal review processes that would keep track of him didn't.'"

The Times' informant speculates that this has something to do with not letting the Red Cross see the prisoner, but this doesn't make sense if they aren't "interviewing" him, eh?