The XX Factor: What women really think.

Gitmo Drama

Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Obama, flew back to his native Britain this week and, like many a former detainee before him, said the U.S. had tortured him. He used the adjective "medieval" to make sure to get his point across.

In a sense, this is useful for the Obama administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder travels to Guantanamo for military briefings about the 245 remaining detainees. Disturbing accounts like Mohamed's—though aspects of them can't be verified—spotlight all the problems with the Bush approach to the detainees, and all the reasons for Obama to deal with them differently and eventually to close Gitmo. And there's another kind of utility, as well: The attention to Mohamed and torture takes attention away from the dense, tricky legal questions on which the Obama lawyers have been siding with their Bush predecessors. So far, there's the new administration's defense of the state-secrets privilege in the case about extraordinary rendition and torture by the CIA, its quiet effort to dismiss the lawsuit demanding that Bush officials find 15 million e-mails missing from White House accounts, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Senatory Leahy's truth commission proposal. Mohamed's story is terrible, and also easier to make a headline out of.