Run For Your Lives, Suspect Transferred To Domestic Prison!

Today Ahmed Ghailani arrived in New York to face trial over his role in the US Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Remarkably, the city of New York did not spontaneously empty, nobody started running through the streets in terror, and even Fox News - FOX NEWS - continued to broadcast from their New York studios, despite the presence of a Dangerous Terrorist in their city. So far, Ghailani has not broken free from his cell and gone on a jihadist rampage through Manhattan, ending by climbing the Empire State Building and picking helicopters out of the air. Of course, there's always time.

Republican bedwetters continued to shriek in terror at this development, and to be sure they have a salient point - other than Ramzi Yousef, Zacarias Moussaoui, and 216 total prisoners with ties to terrorism, no Dangerous Terrorist has ever been brought to this country before.

Now that Ghailani is here in the United States, he'll probably be given access to all telecommunications material, and can call his Terrorist friend Lakhdar Boumediene, who obviously is the scariest person on the face of the Earth, and should be locked up for another 7 1/2 years the way he was at Guantanamo since 2001.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Boumediene said the interrogators at Gitmo never once asked him about this alleged plot, which he denied playing any part it.

"I'm a normal man," said Boumediene, who at the time of his arrest worked for the Red Crescent, providing help to orphans and others in need. "I'm not a terrorist."

The 43-year-old Algerian is now back with his wife and two daughters, a free man in France after a Republican judge found the evidence against Boumediene lacking. He is best known from the landmark Supreme Court case last year, Boumediene v. Bush, which said detainees have the right to challenge their detention in court.

That decision was a stunning rebuke of the Bush administration's policies on terror suspects. It set up a ruling by District Court Judge Richard Leon, a former counsel to Republicans in Congress appointed to the bench by Bush, that there was no credible evidence to keep Boumediene detained.

After what Boumediene described as a 7½ year nightmare, he is now a free man. Boumediene: "I don't think. I'm sure" about torture [...]

Boumediene described being pulled up from under his arms while sitting in a chair with his legs shackled, stretching him. He said that he was forced to run with the camp's guards and if he could not keep up, he was dragged, bloody and bruised.

He described what he called the "games" the guards would play after he began a hunger strike, putting his food IV up his nose and poking the hypodermic needle in the wrong part of his arm.

"You think that's not torture? What's this? What can you call this? Torture or what?" he said, indicating the scars he bears from tight shackles. "I'm an animal? I'm not a human?"

Well, he was so dangerous that a judge found he had no material support to terrorism! What would YOU do to him? We have to torture anyone as long as it protects the country - unless we're talking about right-wing domestic terrorists.

I don't want to see those 17 Uighurs who were cleared for release getting any funny ideas about being free, either.

OK, I can't keep this up.

Stories Of The Tortured

Just a news flash for the 10 people who still think we don't torture, or that the program wasn't widespread policy across all of our detention centers: we do.

(CNN) -- As one of the right-hand men to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the first Taliban leaders arrested when the United States began military operations in Afghanistan.

As a detainee, he was held both at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- spending more than three years in Guantanamo before he was released in 2006.

Now free, Zaeef -- who claims he is no longer a Taliban member -- alleges the military engaged in abusive treatment both at Bagram and Guantanamo. He says he is still bitter about his time there. Closing Guantanamo Bay, he told CNN, is only part of the justice those detained there deserve.

"It was a bad stain on American history," he said. "If they are closing Guantanamo for justice, they have to bring the people who are torturing people, who abuse people, to justice."

The military has classified those like Zaeef as "enemy combatants," although the Justice Department in March said it would dispose of that classification. The U.S. military in Afghanistan said it was not authorized to comment on Zaeef's or any other individual case.

"I didn't see a worse situation in my life than Bagram," recalled Zaeef. "They were beating me, they put me in the snow, in the cold, until I was unconscious."

Zaaef didn't "return to jihad," as the New York Times put it, but he certainly expressed how those beaten and tortured in custody would come out of that seeking revenge, even if they had no Islamist tendencies beforehand. Hard to say that these people "returned" to the fight. This is what former elite interrogator "Matthew Alexander" (a pseudonym) means when he says that torture cost us thousands of American lives and created far more terrorist attacks than it stopped.

"At the prison where I conducted interrogations," responded Alexander, "we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."

Read the story, too, of Lakhdar Boumediene, picked up off the street and falsely accused of terrorism, held at Guantanamo Bay and questioned about events about which he didn't know anything, stuck with a feeding tube and force-fed through a nostril for TWO YEARS, and finally released in Paris when the government had to admit they had no proof. He's a strong man that just wants his quiet life back.

This is why even David Petraeus understands the counter-productive nature of torture. It destroys our ideals and debases our values. It creates a recruiting tool for terrorists and leaves our own troops open to attack and abuse. As a practical matter as well as a matter of law, it makes no sense.