There is really not much to compare this to.  I would like to joke, like Monty Python, and say that no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.  Except that in America in the fall of 2005 it is not a joke at all.  It is simply what we are becoming.  

The story is from Reuters, 22 November.  

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) – A federal jury on Tuesday found a U.S. man guilty of conspiring with al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate     President George W. Bush, rejecting his claims of torture by Saudi police.

The 12-member jury found Ahmed Abu Ali, 24, guilty of all charges in a nine-count indictment. He had been charged with conspiracy to assassinate Bush, conspiring to support and supporting al Qaeda, and conspiracy to hijack aircraft.

Abu Ali, who lived in Falls Church, Virginia, close to Washington, was arrested in June 2003 while studying at a Saudi university and was held in Saudi custody for 20 months before returning to the United States after being indicted.

In Saudi Arabia, he signed confessions and made statements admitting to the plot against Bush and to having ties to an al Qaeda cell.

Abu Ali pleaded not guilty to the charges, saying he made up the confessions after being tortured by Saudi police. His lawyers had urged the jury to acquit him because all the evidence against him was obtained through coercion.

 

There was no other evidence of note.  But the jury affirmed this new American technique of “evidence” by torture:

But after nearly three full days of deliberation, the jury found Abu Ali guilty.

It is being appealed.  

(More after the break.)  

Update [2005-11-23 1:49:15 by Gaianne]:

The BBC has the story as well
Ironically, I found the above item on my Yahoo browser after reading Cathy from Canada quoting Digby:  

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo — you didn’t question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it’s wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it’s immoral — and, more shockingly, whether it’s a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” he couldn’t ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family (and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It’s not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture is really torture if it features less than “pain equavalent to organ failure.” People no longer instinctively recoil at the word — it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights. It spirals down from there.

When the smoke finally clears, and we can see past that dramatic day on 9/11 and put the threat of islamic fundamentalism into its proper perspective, I wonder if we’ll be able to go back to our old ethical framework? I’m not so sure we will even want to. It’s not that it changed us so much as it revealed us, I think. A society that can so easily discard it’s legal and ethical taboos against cruelty and barbarism, is an unstable society to begin with.

At this rather late stage in life, I’m realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable — torture was one of them.

Digby details, what others have commented on, that torture has no practical value for finding truth.  Moreover, evidence shows how it becomes an obsession that becomes an end in itself.  He is writing about American military and intelligence policies.  Yet almost simultaneously, these policies are being applied to our civic life as well.  And a jury of American citizens accepts this.  

Digby’s feeling of the loss of civilized moorings was a common one for Germans in the 1930’s, who still thought of Germany as the cultural center of Europe (which in the previous century it had been.)  

For what it is worth.