U.S. dropping charges against 9/11 suspect
Saudi had been called the '20th hijacker'

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The Pentagon is dropping charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo Bay who was supposed to have been the "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of six men facing murder charges before a U.S. military tribunal for the attacks.

But U.S. military defense lawyers confirmed to the Associated Press on Monday that a Pentagon official has finalized the charges only against the other five, including the alleged architect of the attacks.

U.S. officials have said al-Qahtani was subjected to harsh treatment authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

And that's the entire article.

To see it in its Houston Chronicle context, click here.

This is a troubling article for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is somewhat amazing that the dismissal of charges against the "twentieth hijacker" doesn't get front page treatment. Indeed, I found this on the AP news feed that the Chronicle runs only online--if I blinked, I would have missed it entirely. But isn't this rather significant? I fully understand why the Bush administration would like this to be kept quiet, and FOX News too, for that matter, but I'm flabbergasted that the rest of the mainstream corporate dominated media are in on burying the story.

And burying it is what they're doing. I glanced at the Wikipedia entry for Mohammed al-Qahtani and it straight up says that the reason he isn't being tried is that Bush's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, a.k.a. "torture," essentially killed the case. That is, al-Qahtani's civil rights were so grossly violated that he is unconvictable. Why on earth does this article make no mention of that? Isn't that essential to understanding the story? I don't get it. The corporate media is seemingly over Bush, over the mad patriotism that made everything the White House does fantastic and wonderful. But here they are warping and twisting as though it was 2003.

What the fuck is going on here?

Secondly, what the fuck is going on with the 9/11 case overall? And it is a case because it was a crime, a massive crime, rather than the popular conception pushed by Bush that it was an "act of war." The Feds have held six people for over half a decade now who were supposedly involved in the plot. Al-Qahtani has apparently beaten the rap, with no small help from the President, but even more suspects, most notably Osama bin Laden, continue to roam the world free.

Has anybody at all been convicted for their involvement in the 9/11 attacks? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is a big huge "no." And they've had five years! Five fucking years! We've destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, scared the shit out of the world, shredded trillions of dollars, destroyed foundational laws and rights of all Americans, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it.

What the fuck is going on? Israel and the U.K. have been making successful terrorism busts for decades, like clockwork, efficiently and intelligently, and back in the day the FBI managed to track down our own homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh pretty quickly and easily, too, and the DOJ was able to get the death penalty.

Are we really that pathetic these days? Or is something more sinister afoot? I honestly don't know. It's the old "Is Bush incompetent or is he evil?" question. I'd pretty much settled on incompetence, but the unraveling of these terrorism cases is so over-the-top, it's moving me back toward the evil side of the question.

UPDATE: The AP updated the story after a few hours; it now has about three times as much text as the one copied and pasted above. However, as in the version above, the update only hints at assertions that Bush-sanctioned torture killed the case. Further, I can't find it at all on the Chronicle's main page--it's not even in the AP news feed anymore. I mean, I'm sure it's there somewhere, but I'd have to dig around for a while to get to it. Still strikes me as burying the story. Further, the new version continues to say nothing about Bush's lack of success, after all these years, in convicting 9/11 conspirators.

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