Torture? How unthinkable...

I remember the time well because I watched Bush's speech on television in the breakfast room of a hotel in Lyon, France. So Bush was talking in September, 2006. He was agitated and forceful, hitting the podium with the flat of his hand as he often does when his innate paranoia is in overdrive. Congress, you see, was running out of time to pass the Military Commissions Act; "high value prisoners" were on their way to Guantanamo from CIA dungeons in (probably) Eastern Europe, and it was essential to have procedures in place which would allow trials to proceed immediately. And incidentally, included in that statute was another blanket pardon for anybody roughing up Arabs in the mistaken belief it was okay to work them over because they were, after all, Arabs, and not some higher form of combatant entitled to the full panoply of protections under the Geneva Conventions like, for example, members of Hitler's SS.

Bush went on to explain how valuable all the "tough procedures" had been in interrupting myriad evil designs against America, and how absolutely wrong it would be to prosecute a dedicated U.S. employee (like the President of the United States, as one example) for doing something in good faith which the Supreme Court sort of implied in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld he couldn't do without...well, committing a war crime under international law and the United States Code Annotated. Time was of the essence, and certainly Bush might face the argument by cynics that what made time so essential was that the Democrats were coming, the Democrats were coming, all as a result of the colossal mind-fuck to which L'il George himself had subjected the country during the previous six years or so. No problem; George can handle that kind of static. He can handle anything as long as his retirement plans don't get messed up.

So George got his pardon and America got its Military Tribunals in Guantanamo, and the years passed and we never actually tried anyone. The high value detainees settled in there at the far eastern end of Cuba, still valuable as propaganda trophies from the Great War on Terror, if nothing else. But eventually, after building a new court house and employing all that staff and making all that political noise, and with even people like Robert Gates and Condi Rice saying we ought to close the frigging place, you have to do something. So they put on trial one of the many Arabs who have been called the "20th hijacker." And here's what happened:

"The US has dropped charges against one of the six al-Qaida suspects charged with the 9/11 attacks, bolstering critics of the controversial military tribunal system set up to try the detainees.

"The Pentagon official in charge of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay dropped the death penalty case against Mohammed al-Qahtani without explanation. Lawyers for al-Qahtani attributed the move to clear evidence that the detainee was tortured while in US custody.

"Mr al-Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture," the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represented al-Qahtani, said."

Thus reported the Guardian (UK) on May 14, 2008. Naturally, you're as confused as I am, because if there is one thing Mr. Bush has been clear about it's that "the United States does not torcher." If he's said it once (and he has), he's said it a hundred times (and he has).

Now I understand that terrorist suspects are not going to get the red carpet treatment we associate in our minds with an American citizen (other than Jose Padilla) who is accorded the whole drill of Miranda rights, the access to counsel, the advice that he does not need to make any statement at all, and the rest of that Warren Court coddling we've all seen a million times, from Joe Friday to CSI: Miami. But here's what I'm also thinking: this whole procedure is happening down in Cuba, a place chosen for its difficulty of access, a place where the prying eyes of the media never intrude, where the lawyers for the detainees (I was about to say "accused," but that doesn't apply to the vast majority) routinely report, in torrents of affidavits and blogging, that the prisoners are subjected to absolutely horrendous denials of due process; where there are insane rules which prohibit an accused from describing torture to his own lawyer because it's a "state secret;" where a lot of the evidence is anonymous hearsay which the lawyer cannot challenge because the attorney doesn't know who said it and under what circumstances (like torture) the statement was made. And that's if the lawyer and accused are even allowed to know about the evidence.

So if that's the context (and it is, in the main), what kind of brutality must have gone on with al-Qahtani to cause an American military commission to throw out a case against a "9/11 co-conspirator"? To conclude that the whole case was so tainted with coercion and violations of fair judicial process that they couldn't try an Arab in Cuba in front of the military brass? Despite Mr. Bush's assurances, is it just barely possible that the United States does, in fact, commit torcher?