Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

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The Ongoing Collapse of the Gitmo Military Commissions

Betrayals, Backsliding and Boycotts

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Anyone who has kept half an eye on the proceedings at the Military Commissions in Guantánamo -- the unique system of trials for “terror suspects” that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers -- will be aware that their progress has been faltering at best. After six and a half years, in which they have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, derailed by their own military judges, relentlessly savaged by their own military defense lawyers, and condemned as politically motivated by their own former chief prosecutor, they have only secured one contentious result: a plea bargain negotiated by the Australian David Hicks, who admitted to providing “material support for terrorism,” and dropped his well-chronicled claims of torture and abuse by US forces, in order to secure his return to Australia to serve out the remainder of a meager nine-month sentence last March.

In the last few weeks, however, Cheney’s dream has been souring at an even more alarming rate than usual. Following boycotts of pre-trial hearings in March and April by three prisoners -- Mohamed Jawad, Ahmed al-Darbi and Ibrahim al-Qosi -- the latest appearance by Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden, spread the words “boycott” and “Guantánamo” around the world.

Salim Hamdan’s boycott

Hamdan is no ordinary Guantánamo prisoner. It was his case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that shut down the Military Commissions’ first incarnation in June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, a decision that forced the administration to press new legislation -- the Military Commissions Act -- through a sleeping Congress later that year.

But Hamdan’s fame meant little to him on April 29, when he too decided to boycott his trial, telling Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the judge in his last scheduled pre-trial hearing before his trial in June, “The law is clear. The Constitution is clear. International law is clear. Why don't we follow the law? Where is the justice?”

For his part, Capt. Allred did not give up without attempting to persuade Hamdan that he should believe in the legal process before which he found himself. “You should have great faith in the law,” he said. “You won. Your name is all over the law books.” This was true, but it was little consolation for Hamdan, who was charged again as soon as the Commissions were revived in Congress. Nor could Capt. Allred’s addendum -- “You even won the very first time you came before me” -- sway him, even though that too was true.

Last June, when Hamdan appeared before Capt. Allred for the first time, in the first pre-trial hearing for his new Military Commission, Allred dismissed the case, pointing out that the Military Commissions Act, which had revived the Commissions, applied only to “unlawful enemy combatants,” whereas Hamdan, and every other prisoner in Guantánamo for that matter, had only been determined to be “enemy combatants” in the tribunals -- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals -- that had made them eligible for trial by Military Commission.

It was small wonder that Hamdan was despondent, however. Two months later, an appeals court reversed Allred’s decision, and Hamdan -- twice a victor -- was charged once more, and removed from a privileged position in Guantánamo’s Camp IV -- reserved for a few dozen compliant prisoners who live communally -- to Camp VI, where, like the majority of the prisoners, he has spent most of his time in conditions that amount to solitary confinement, and where, as his lawyers pointed out in February, his mental health has deteriorated significantly.

As he prepared to boycott proceedings, Hamdan had a few last questions for Capt. Allred. He asked the judge why the government had changed the law -- “Is it just for my case?” -- and responded to Allred’s insistence that he would do everything he could to give him a fair trial by asking, “By what law will you try me?” When Allred replied that he would be tried under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan gave up. “But the government changed the law to its advantage,” he said. “I am not being tried by the American law.”

Col. Morris Davis condemns the Commissions (again)

Hamdan’s eloquent and restrained explanation for his boycott was the most poignant event in his hearing, but it was not the most explosive. That accolade was reserved for Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Commissions, who resigned noisily last October, citing political interference in the process. Once the Commissions’ stoutest supporter -- in 2006 he told reporters, “Remember if you dragged Dracula out into the sunlight he melted? Well, that’s kind of the way it is trying to drag a detainee into the courtroom” -- Col. Davis explained his Damascene conversion in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in December.

Laying into his chain of command, Col. Davis lambasted his immediate boss, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, who had recently been appointed as the legal adviser to the Commissions’ “convening authority” Susan Crawford, for politicizing the process, attempting to hold higher profile trials behind closed doors (whereas Davis insisted that transparency was “critical”). He also criticized Crawford, a retired judge, who had served as Army counsel and defense department inspector under Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration in the 1980s, for overstepping her administrative role by “intermingling convening authority and prosecutor roles” and “perpetuat[ing] the perception of a rigged process stacked against the accused.”

Col. Davis also delivered a particularly stern rebuke to Crawford’s overall boss, the Department of Defense’s chief counsel William J. Haynes II, pointing out Haynes’ role in “authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture,” declaring, “I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned,” and declaring, unambiguously, that he resigned “a few hours after” being informed that he had been placed in a chain of command under Haynes.

On April 28, Col. Davis testified for Hamdan and reprised his complaints, telling Capt. Allred, as the Washington Post described it, that senior Pentagon officials, including deputy defense secretary Gordon England, had “made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have ‘strategic political value.’” After pointing out that he had wanted to wait until both the cases and the entire Military Commissions system had “a more solid legal footing,” he reiterated his complaints against Haynes, telling Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Hamdan’s military defense lawyer, what he had told the Nation in February: that, during a discussion of the Nuremberg Trials, in which Davis had noted that there had been some acquittals, which had “lent great credibility to the proceedings,” Haynes had told him, “We can't have acquittals. We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.”

Col. Davis also defended his uncompromising opposition to the use of evidence obtained through torture, once more directing particular criticism at Brig. Gen. Hartmann. “To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind,” he said, adding that, in response to his complaints, Hartmann had replied that “everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out.” He added that Hartmann “took ‘micromanagement’ of the prosecution effort to a new level and treated prosecutors with ‘cruelty and maltreatment,’” and explained that he “was trying to take over the prosecutor's role, compromising the independence of the Office of Military Commissions, which decides which cases to bring and what evidence to use.”

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul and Omar Khadr

A week later, on May 7, the boycott bandwagon rolled on when Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, another Yemeni, also refused to cooperate. Sitting alone in Camp Justice, Guantánamo’s new courtroom, having spurned the assistance of his government-appointed attorney, al-Bahlul, who is accused of producing videos for al-Qaeda, and who famously boycotted his pre-Hamdan Commission hearings in 2006, essentially picked up where he left off over two years ago, proudly proclaiming his association with Osama bin Laden, and telling his judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, “We will continue our jihad and nothing’s going to stop us. You must not oppress the people in the land. Your oppression against us and your support to the strategic ally in the region is what made me leave my house and today, I’m telling you, and you’re a man of law, if you sentence me to life … me and the others will be the reason for the continuation of the war against America.” He added that he did not intend to dispute any of the prosecution’s allegations. “I am responsible for my own actions in this world and the afterworld,” he said. “I don’t consider it to be a crime.”

While al-Bahlul’s words -- delivered to full advantage from his sudden perch in the media spotlight -- served only to underline, incongruously, the utter silence in which around 200 other Guantánamo prisoners are held (those considered less dangerous, or not dangerous at all, whom the administration has no intention of ever prosecuting), his words were almost immediately overshadowed when, the day after, Col. Brownback, who was on the verge of securing a dubious place in the history books by ruling that the trial of Omar Khadr -- the only prisoner to date who has not boycotted his hearings -- would go ahead in June, threatened his own boycott.

Furious that, despite repeated requests, the prosecution (led by Maj. Jeffrey Groharing) had failed to provide Khadr’s lawyers with their client’s Detainee Information Management System records, to analyze his treatment in an attempt to uncover reasons why incriminating statements -- possibly obtained through torture -- should be suppressed, Col. Brownback declared, “I have been badgered, beaten and bruised by Maj. Groharing since the 7th of November to set a trial date. To get a trial date, I need to get discovery done.” He then ordered the government to provide the records by May 22, or, he said, he would suspend the proceedings entirely

While Khadr’s lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, expressed skepticism about Col. Brownback’s exclamation, telling reporters, “What we've seen in this process is that military judges will give the defense pyrrhic victories when it doesn't threaten the foundations of the system,” Brownback’s intervention at the very least delayed confirmation of his own notoriety. If he decides, after May 22, to proceed with the trial of Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was captured after a gun battle in Afghanistan that left one US soldier dead, he will be the first judge since the Second World War to proceed with a war crimes trial against a prisoner who was just a child when he was captured.

Judge bars Commissions’ legal adviser

The day after Col. Brownback’s shake-up of the prosecutors in Omar Khadr’s case, Capt. Allred, having mulled over Morris Davis’ complaints against Brig. Gen. Hartmann, surprised everyone, and threatened the Commissions’ teetering legitimacy once more, by disqualifying Hartmann from playing any role in Salim Hamdan’s trial. Clearly swayed by Davis’ testimony, Capt. Allred ruled on May 9 that he was “too closely allied with the prosecution,” as the New York Times described it. “National attention focused on this dispute has seriously called into question the legal adviser's ability to continue to perform his duties in a neutral and objective manner,” Allred wrote, explaining that public concern about the fairness of the cases was “deeply disturbing,” and that he did not find that Hartmann “retains the required independence from the prosecution.”

The Times followed up with more excerpts from Capt. Allred’s decision, which confirmed his support for Morris Davis’ views. “Telling the chief prosecutor (and other prosecutors),” he wrote, “that certain types of cases would be tried and that others would not be tried, because of political factors such as whether they would capture the imagination of the American people, be sexy, or involve blood on the hands of the accused, suggests that factors other than those pertaining to the merits of the case were at play.”

Capt. Allred also referred explicitly to Morris Davis’ statement that Brig. Gen. Hartmann had put pressure on him to use evidence obtained through torture. Noting, as the Times put it, that “prosecutors have an ethical obligation to present only evidence they consider reliable,” Capt. Allred wrote that directing the use of “evidence that the chief prosecutor considered tainted and unreliable, or perhaps obtained as a result of torture or coercion, was clearly an effort to influence the professional judgment of the chief prosecutor.”

9/11 charges confirmed, but Mohammed al-Qahtani dropped

While the administration tried to make light of Capt. Allred’s ruling, arguing that it applied only to Hamdan’s case, and that Brig. Gen. Hartmann’s position was secure, it was difficult not to whiff a stench of desperation in the Pentagon’s announcement, just three days later, that a date had been set for the first pre-trial hearing of another group of prisoners -- the alleged 9/11 conspirators, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in his tribunal last year that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z” -- against whom charges had been announced in February.

Although it’s almost certain that this decision -- though perhaps rushed forward -- had already been making its tortuous way through the necessary bureaucratic processes, its propaganda value was immediately undermined when it became apparent that, of the six men initially charged, one -- Mohammed al-Qahtani -- was missing from the final charge sheet.

As Time explained, the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped by Susan Crawford “without formal explanation,” and Brig. Gen Hartmann’s offering -- that the dismissal provided evidence of the “strength of the system and the careful, deliberative and fair legal process in place at Guantánamo” -- was hardly sufficient to paper over the cracks. Although the charges were dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they could be reinstated in the future, nobody expects that this will happen.

The problem, as immediately became apparent, is that al-Qahtani, unlike the other five men, who were held for many years in secret prisons run by the CIA, was subjected to torture in Guantánamo, under a program devised specifically for him and approved by Donald Rumsfeld in late 2002. The details of his ordeal are well known, as Time published his leaked interrogation log in 2006, and even a military investigation in 2005, which stopped short of describing his treatment as torture, concluded that he had been subjected to abuse.

In the world of the Military Commissions, al-Qahtani’s case was damaging for two specific reasons: firstly, because, although the other five men were tortured in CIA custody -- and the CIA has publicly acknowledged that KSM was subjected to the torture technique known as waterboarding (a horrendous form of controlled drowning) -- he and the others have been reinterrogated by “clean teams” of FBI agents, who have solicited confessions without resorting to torture, whereas al-Qahtani, according to his lawyers, has not.

Leaving aside for a moment the implausibility of somehow “purifying” confessions obtained through torture by using “clean teams” -- and what it reveals, unintentionally, about the “dirty teams” whose activities are purportedly being airbrushed from history -- the second reason for dropping charges against al-Qahtani only reinforces the legal netherworld in which the Commissions operate. According to their rules, the records of al-Qahtani’s interrogations, which took place in Guantánamo, could be produced as evidence of torture, whereas those of the “high-value detainees,” interrogated by CIA teams in secret overseas prisons, can be overlooked, because, as Time put it, “Military courts overseeing Guantánamo have indicated they cannot compel evidence from US intelligence agencies.”

In reality, of course, it’s inconceivable that the trials of tortured prisoners -- even those who apparently masterminded the 9/11 attacks -- can actually proceed without torture being mentioned, but for now, at least, the administration is clinging to its “clean team” alibi, and hoping to minimize the fallout from Capt. Allred’s latest ruling.

As for al-Qahtani, described by his lawyer, Gita Gutierrez, as a “broken man, broken by torture,” his only way out now is for the Saudi government to negotiate his repatriation. Gutierrez told Time that she was “extremely concerned about his ability to survive mentally and physically for much longer in Guantánamo,” and stated, unequivocally, that the dismissal of charges “clearly indicates the government's awareness that any and all statements obtained from Mohammed [al-]Qahtani were extracted by torture or the threat of torture.” Replace his name with that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any of the other four men charged -- Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Walid bin Attash -- and you see the problem that faces the administration as it prepares for the most significant trial since 9/11.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

 

 

 

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