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In the long, dark farce of Guantánamo’s military commissions, the recently announced and almost entirely ignored decision by the Pentagon to turn down a plea deal for Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a prominent CIA torture victim and the alleged architect of the Al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, and to proceed, instead, with an unwinnable trial, is just the latest manifestation of a refusal by successive US administrations to reckon with the corrosive effects of the use of torture.

With this decision, the Trump administration has now embraced a sickening and enduring bi-partisan consensus that, when it comes to those accused of the gravest crimes at Guantánamo — including the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 — it is preferable to cling to an unworkable belief in vengeance, through a fantastical belief in successful prosecutions that involve the death penalty, than to admit that the use of torture on the defendants has thoroughly undermined that possibility.

The reality, which every administration has denied — from Bush to Obama, and from Biden to Trump — is that torture, undertaken over many years in the CIA’s global network of “black site” torture prisons, is so fundamentally incompatible with justice that the only viable way forward is to agree to plea deals that take the death penalty off the table in exchange for lifelong imprisonment at Guantánamo and full and frank confessions that bring some measure of “closure.”

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