The Bush administration’s plan for rigged 9/11 terrorist show trials to coincide with the 2008 presidential election has run into legal difficulties.

Charges have been dropped against the “20th hijacker,” Mohamed al-Qahtani. He allegedly came to the United States to take part in the September 11, 2001 attacks, but he was denied entry to the U.S. by an immigration agent at Orlando International Airport. Captured on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, al-Qahtani has been held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps since January of 2002.

At Guantanamo, al-Qahtani was apparently subjected to every form of torture and abuse that the young, mostly inexperienced, military intelligence personnel could think up. It was all approved at the highest levels. Al-Qahtani has denied the allegations against him and stated that they are all based on confessions coerced from him during the months when he was being subjected to torture.

In November 2006, senior investigators with the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) told MSNBC.com that they were told by military prosecutors that al-Qahtani would be “unprosecutable” because of what was done to him during interrogation. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Mr. al Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture. The unconscionable techniques used on him are well-documented and were authorized directly by the White House. His torture log is a shameful window onto the depravity of this administration and the depths to which they have been willing to sink.

Legal proceeding continue against five other defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of 9/11 attacks, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who admits to being Osama bin Laden’s $200-a-month personal driver and bodyguard, and Ramzi Binalshibh, who is alleged to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and al-Qaeda leaders. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for all of them.

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Updates to this story after the break…


UPDATE: From AFP:

Navy Captain Keith Allred, the military judge in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, on Friday disqualified the Pentagon’s legal adviser for the military commissions from further participation in the Hamdan case, which is supposed to go to trial June 2.

Allred found that the legal adviser, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, pressed for war crimes prosecutions based on “political factors such as whether they would capture the imagination of the American people, be sexy, or involve blood on the hands of the accused.”

UPDATE: From Think Progress, we learn that torturing an accused low-level al Qaeda suicide hijacker (and thereby making him “unprosecutable”) did not even yield any useful information.

Renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands, who has extensively studied Qahtani, talked to PBS’s Bill Moyers about the interrogations of Qahtani on Friday. “And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of him,” Sands explained.

UPDATE: The Bush show trials might backfire in another way. Assuming that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed goes forward, families of 9/11 victims worry that he will be given a public platform to glorify his role and rally support for al Qaeda.

[F]amilies are bracing for another round of self-aggrandizing rhetoric from the man who claimed during a hearing in March 2007 that he was responsible for the Sept. 11 operation “from A to Z.”