This made me sick to my stomach:

It is hard to keep finding new ways to express one’s outrage at stuff like this, but what the Murat Kurnaz case brought to my mind was the thought that the Bush administration has finally made the U.S. a real life perpetrator of the sort of totalitarian nightmare that “western” culture spent so much energy imagining during the Cold War. I mean the sort of high and low popular culture I grew up with: 1984, The Prisoner, any number of Twilight Zone and Mission: Impossible and Star Trek episodes and World War II films. I even remember seeing an episode of Gunsmoke along these lines.I am not talking about the torture aspect, at least not entirely. The crux of the nightmare was a person facing the coercive power of the state or analogous entity without the expected Anglo-American legal protections: no rights to outside help or information, to know the charges against one, to defend oneself, to be tried fairly and promptly based on factual evidence. Capt. Kirk or Number 6 or some other stalwart white male hero would find himself in the hands of all-powerful beings with a mysterious agenda and unanswerable demands, face some preposterous mockery of a trial, get tortured or otherwise mistreated, pontificate heroically about his rights as a free man, and finally, escape or not depending on the pretentiousness of the drama.

The tradition actually goes back further than the Cold War, to certain of the captivity narratives and the journalistic melodramas that were made of real and imagined cases of British or Federalist or Catholic tyranny. (The tyrant varied according to time and the writer.) The Democratic Republican newspapers of the late 1790s made such stories out of the Sedition Act trials. They also raised a huge cry over the case of a man who called himself Jonathan Robbins, a professed American accused of being an Irish deserter by the British and eventually turned over to the British, for trial and execution, by the Adams administration.

A German citizen, Murat Kurnaz was pulled off a bus in Pakistan (the U.S. was paying bounties for “suspicious” foreigners), held incommunicado and without charges for years, and put through a constant round of “enhanced” interrogations in which he was repeatedly asked where Osama bin Laden was and similar questions he had no way to answer. Flailing to justify to Kurnaz’s “enemy combatant” status, “Military prosecutors said one of Kurnaz’s friends was a suicide bomber, but the friend turned up alive and well in Germany. ” When that gambit failed, according to the transcript on the CBS web site:

They kept him, Kurnaz says, by inventing new charges. In a makeshift courthouse, Kurnaz claims that a military judge charged that Kurnaz had been picked up near Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Ironic, since it was the U.S. that flew him to Afghanistan to begin with.

The break in Kurnaz’s case came when the German chancellor asked President Bush for his release. In August 2006, a plane came to take Kurnaz home. On the way out he was asked to sign a confession his captors had written for him saying he’d been al Qaeda all along. He refused. On the plane he was chained and surrounded by soldiers. But by the end of the flight, he was free.

Vintage science fiction TV fans who saw the Kurnaz story on 60 Minutes or read the whole transcript will note that Captain Kirk and Number 6 were usually held in much nicer conditions.