Dining on Ashes

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to planning the brutal attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the horrific beheading of Daniel Pearl. This should be a cause for rejoicing in America. We have a confession to some of the most terrible events in recent American history. High fives all around. The Bush administration has come through on one of its main goals and most sincere promises and has brought one of the great monsters in recent memory to justice. Why am I not feeling celebratory?

Well, it all comes down to torture. The Bush Administration has bent over backwards to maintain the use of physical coercion to extract information from prisoners. With that policy in effect, no information that comes from a detainee can be trusted. Everything must be verified by an external source or circumstantial evidence.

Mohammed's testimony, as swaggering and full of bravado as it may be, cannot be taken at face value because our own government has rendered it useless. This is the great tragedy of torture. Torture usurps the truth. It casts doubt on witnesses and calls into question any evidence led to by testimony under it. We have no idea if Mohammed spilled his vile guts to get torture to end. We don't know if this was false bravado to convince his captors of his truthfulness. We also don't know if this is true and genuine testimony brought about by excellent interrogation by military and CIA operatives. Any hard work done by them has been undone by the Administration's policy of physical coercion. Even if Mohammed himself has never been so much as given an uncomfortable chair, the very existence of a policy allowing torture renders his testimony in doubt.

There is no victory over terror here. Our own President has taken it from us. We dine, tonight, on ashes.