Torture's Blowback

The ghosts of interrogations past have come back to haunt the Bush administration. This week, the legal officer supervising the military trials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dismissed capital charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the 20th hijacker during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had he not been prevented from entering the country. The decision has been widely reported as a serious setback for the administration's quest to bring terrorists to justice. It is much more and much worse than that: It is a palpable reminder of the inhumane acts committed by U.S. personnel and sanctioned by top officials in the name of protecting Americans from extremists.

Once described by the administration as one of the "worst of the worst," Mr. Qahtani was captured in late 2001 and has been held by the United States ever since. In trying to squeeze information from the Saudi national, U.S. personnel obtained permission from then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to threaten Mr. Qahtani with dogs, force him to withstand prolonged stress positions, interrogate him for 20 hours a day and subject him to sexual humiliation in order to break him psychologically. By most accounts Mr. Qahtani is now indeed a broken man, unable to communicate meaningfully even with those who would help him. Susan J. Crawford, who dismissed the charges against him, either came to believe that Mr. Qahtani's statements were unreliable and inadmissible because they were coerced; or, perhaps, that the proceedings against Mr. Qahtani had to be halted to keep a litany of abuses from being recounted within earshot of the rest of the world.

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