Update: Forever War Means Forever Detention Without Trial

Last week, in a fit of irrational exuberance, I reported on a plea deal to resolve the cases against three of the architects of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.  That plea deal has now been scuppered through the usual combination of thirst for retribution, political posturing on the one hand, and lack of political will on the other.  In short, as Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt reported in The New York Times yesterday, under pressure from relatives of the dead and the same knuckleheads who prevented the overdue closure of the Guantanamo detention center during the Obama administration, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin, III cancelled the plea deals.  Families of victims who supported the deal suffered "emotional whiplash."

Millions of people who were  alive that day feel some special connection to the events of 9/11.  Mine is that I worked in the World Trade Center and watched my office building burn that morning from the street.  I made it home in time to watch that building collapse on television. I reflected on that experience here. The men responsible for that catastrophe need to have their guilt adjudicated in a court of law which can be a context for fact-finding and some sort of ending to our national ordeal. 

Because the George W. Bush administration engaged in systematic violations of the laws of armed conflict in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques" universally denounced as torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, it will not be possible to have a fully satisfying adjudication of the perpetrators' guilt.  One of the five defendants is now unfit to stand trial, likely because the conditions of his detention rendered him so. Evidence gathered against the others may not be admissible because it was produced under conditions that render it of dubious reliability as a true accounting of the facts.

The plea deals were likely the only path forward towards some sort of final reckoning with these mass murderers.  That path is now foreclosed and the national shame of indefinite detention without adjudication of guilt will continue.  Inhumane treatment of the detainees will not bring back the dead.  It just heaps on top of a human tragedy a national disgrace which also provides fodder for the sort of hatred that fueled the attacks whose perpetrators, it seems, will never be held to account.