Dafna Linzer does some fantastic reporting on how the government's case against Noor Uthman Mohammed Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, is premised on the testimony of two witnesses, Sharqawi Abdul Ali al Hajj, and Sanad Yislam al Kazimi, who were tortured:
Kazimi was captured in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003. He spent time in five prisons in three countries. In Dubai, he was held secretly for eight months where, he has claimed, he was beaten, shackled naked, exposed to extreme temperatures and simulated drowning, threatened with rape and sexually assaulted.
[...]
Hajj was captured in a major raid in Karachi, Pakistan, in early 2002, and then transferred to Jordan, where he was held in two different facilities for 19 months. Human Rights Watch substantiated his claims of torture while in custody there. He was then transferred to the same CIA prison that housed Kazimi outside Kabul, moved later to Bagram Air Base and eventually to Guantánamo with Kazimi.
These men are apparently also witnesses in the case against alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was himself subject to torture. At the time, conservatives accused the administration of "playing politics," but if they're worried about using Kazimi's and Hajj's statements against Uthman, delaying the case against al-Nashiri makes sense.
Folks like Andy McCarthy have been writing that the government's case against alleged Tanzanian embassy bomber Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, which was set back by a judge's recent ruling that the testimony of a key witness was inadmissible because his identity was gleaned through torture, is one of the reasons not to use civilian courts. As with Ghailani, the statements the government is relying on in the Mohammed case were taken by FBI interrogators who questioned both men after they had been mistreated.
But both Mohammed and al-Nashiri are being tried in the military commissions McCarthy and most Republicans support, and as a result of the Bush administration's policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, the government is still having trouble making its case, even in a forum where the rules are stacked in their favor. The law isn't the problem; torture is the problem.
UPDATE: I was mistaken, Mohammed is designated for indefinite detention, not trial.
