Eoin O’Dell asks a valid question. What is a website for?

His context shows he feels the institutions he looks at failed to achieve what was there to be done; to demonstrate (I think he says) their raison d’etre in the particular instance that presented itself to them.

He (properly) chides them for “missing a trick�.

We have immediate and available demonstrations of what a website is for as seen HERE.

On the internet, doing is demonstrating!

A website has the same purpose as a book or a magazine. Like them, a website is not an innocent production; we must read it with the possible presence of an unreliable narrator in mind.

Subject to that caveat we get, for instance, information about the planned Guantanamo trials HERE and HERE the like of which would never come out other than in a history book years after the event.

Quotes (about the forthcoming trials) like the following have an immediacy no other medium can produce:

According to Col. Morris Davis, who is a former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, it appears that the plan was made ahead of time to have no acquittals, no matter what the evidence was to reveal. General counsel William Haynes is quoted as saying (according to Col. Davis) “We can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? … We’ve got to have convictions.”