An admission of guilt from the Bush administration itself:

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.

The treatment of this guy — legitimately, it appears, a “20th hijacker” and a bad guy — was horrific. The nudity and the dogs and the sexual humiliation is just the window dressing. Our torturers stressed his body to the extent that it sent him into heart failure.

This is clearly a criminal conspirator in the attack of 9/11 — and yet we can’t prosecute his open-and-shut case (Mohamed Atta tried to meet him at the airport!), because Bush, Rumsfeld, & Co. tainted with Soviet-style brutality.

It’s unclear to me how you ever unshit that bed.

As Crawford says: “unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward.”