The Stories of Torture Sounded Made Up. They Weren't.

I remember the day when I first had reason to write the word "torture" in my reporter's notebook. It surely hadn't come up before in my time covering the federal courts for The Post, not even in grisly trial testimony of gangland hit men describing how they offed their drug market rivals and snitches.

In late 2004, I began hearing that some of the 550 foreign men held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were accusing American soldiers and interrogators of brutal, medieval-sounding abuse. Detainees told their newly assigned lawyers that their captors had repeatedly beaten them with rifle butts and fists until they needed hospitalization, kept them from sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time for weeks and shackled their feet and hands to the floor for entire days.

Standing in the granite halls of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse and listening to one hush-hush account, I was skeptical, but scribbled down the details anyway. As I later talked over the rumored claims with my editors, they reacted with a mixture of jaundiced disbelief and caution.

Geez, torture, they said. Could it really be true?

That was more than four years ago. Now "torture" is not just a word scribbled tentatively on a notepad but a practice confirmed by a senior Pentagon official who reviewed the U.S. government's treatment of a prisoner. "We tortured" Mohammed al-Qahtani, military commission leader Susan J. Crawford told The Post's Bob Woodward last week. Her statement didn't shock me; it confirmed what I had come to know about these interrogation methods after years of reporting on Guantanamo. But it got me thinking about what a toxic accusation it had once been, and how reporters had tried to square the prisoners' chilling accounts and the administration's indignant denials about what was happening in U.S.-run detention camps around the world.

By December 2004, the prisoners' stories were just beginning to move from hallway talk among sources and a reporter to public court files, as a result of two major Supreme Court decisions in detainees' favor the previous summer. By a slim majority, the justices had ruled that detainees could challenge their detention in U.S. courts, and that impartial military tribunals should weigh the evidence against them. The Pentagon hastily held the first tribunals in the fall. Then the partially redacted transcripts for dozens of prisoners of Pentagon-run detention centers were filed in the federal court that I covered.

In those transcripts, the government dryly laid out its frightening arguments for linking the detainees to terrorist plots, al-Qaeda cells or even Osama bin Laden himself. The accused had their say as well. One by one, the men brought to Guantanamo's fledgling Camp X-Ray said that they had been rounded up by mistake and horribly abused by interrogators at the prison.

In the first week of December, I came upon a gaggle of lawyers whispering furiously among themselves before entering the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green for a hearing that I'd been warned could make news. Inside, attorney Joe Margulies wouldn't say out loud exactly what had happened to his client, Australian Mamdouh Habib -- many of the details were still classified by the government -- but he was now leveling the charge for the first time in public and using the word. Torture.

"I don't think anything remotely like torture has occurred at Guantanamo," the Justice Department's Brian Boyle insisted in a similar hearing the next day, adding that a few rogue soldiers had been reprimanded for isolated incidents.

The week before Christmas, the Pentagon firmly denied a flurry of new specific torture allegations I had asked about.

"The claim that detainees have been physically abused, beaten or tortured is simply not true," said Army Col. David McWilliams, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees operations at Guantanamo Bay. "From the beginning, we have taken extra steps to treat prisoners not only humanely but extra cautiously. We do not use any kind of coercive or physically harmful techniques."

Meanwhile, in the newsroom, my editors, fellow reporters and I gingerly debated when, exactly, it was appropriate to use the explosive word "torture" in print. The prisoners were making a lot of sensational-sounding claims in court, through their lawyers' filings. How could we get to the truth? And how much credit should we give to men we couldn't talk to, who were alleged by our government to be radical jihadists who had been arrested near al-Qaeda strongholds just before the Sept. 11 attacks?