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We're Moral Idiots

This is several days old, but it keeps nagging at me. See, it turns out that even senior officials at the Pentagon admit we tortured at least one Guantánamo detainee:

"The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration?s system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee . . . . In May she decided that the case could not be referred for trial but provided no explanation at the time.

?. . . . 'His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that?s why I did not refer the case' for prosecution, Ms. Crawford [the official] was quoted as saying in an article published in The Post on Wednesday."

So, now what? Let's assume the individual tortured was a bad, bad man. Should we let him go? No. He's now a bad, bad man with bitter memories and cause to retaliate. Should we continue to detain him even though we know a legal conviction is impossible? No. That's impermissible for reasons obvious to all but the most die-hard Unitary Executive theorists, and perhaps the Chinese.

Thanks to our country's "short sighted and immoral policies of coercive interrogation," the problem is now intractable. We can release the prisoner and expose the country to a very real threat of attack, or we can continue to detain him and degrade the principles we stand for in an unmistakable international gesture of two-faced hypocrisy.

Flash forward to your grandchildren: this will be among inexplicable historic American embarrassments like Japanese internment, Watergate, rollerblades, and recumbent bicycles. In the meantime, what the hell are we going to do?

Sources, and discussion from bigger brains than mine:

• Balkinization
  
• NYT Op Ed(s) (a series of point and counter-points on the issue) 
  
• NYT Article
  
• WA Post Article
  

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on January 16, 2009 (boomark / email).