Former Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene is in the news again, thanks to an exclusive interview with ABC News.

Boumediene is best known for Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled in June 2008 that Guantanamo detainees have the right to habeas corpus.

Boumediene was transported to Guantanamo in 2001 on what appear to have been transparently trumped up charges of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

The backstory is pretty mindboggling, even for the time of Bush. Here’s what the L.A. Times reported in November 2008, when U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered Boumediene and four other Algerian-born men released from Guantanamo:

In the fall of 2001, the Algerian-born men whose case was decided Thursday were suspected of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. But a court in Bosnia rejected the allegation and released the men. Then, U.S. authorities took them into custody and shipped them to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

In January 2002, President Bush referred to the case in his State of the Union address. “Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy,” he said.

But when the case went before the judge, the administration’s lawyers dropped that claim. Instead, they asserted that the Algerians planned to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against U.S. forces. Leon concluded there was little or no evidence to prove the men made such a plan.

Bush, of course, throughout his presidency, excelled in two kinds of rhetorical falsification: exaggerations and lies. The statement from State of the Union address, like his best work, was both.

We didn’t seize these men. We weren’t working with the Bosnian government. What we did was, we squeezed the Bosnian government’s balls, and demanded that these men be handed over to us. Here’s McClatchy‘s account of how the men ended up in U.S. custody:

The Bosnian courts and prosecutors had previously cleared the men, but on Jan. 17, 2002, Bosnia handed the men over to the U.S. government, which then shipped them to Guantanamo. According to the detainees’ lawyers, U.S. diplomats in Sarajevo had threatened the Bosnian government that if Bosnia failed to detain them, the U.S. would withdraw from the Balkan country.

And it doesn’t look like we believed for one single minute that they were plotting to bomb our embassy. It doesn’t look like we even bothered to pretend to believe that.

Not only did we pull a bait-and-switch when it came to the charges against them, but here’s Boumediene’s bombshell from his ABC News interview:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Boumediene said the interrogators at Gitmo never once asked him about this alleged plot…

How telling is that?

The natural question is: why did we so rudely twist the Bosnian government’s arm to disgorge these men into our custody if we didn’t even believe they were plotting to bomb our embassy? As far as anyone can tell, it was to allow George Bush to thump his chest during his 2002 State of the Union address:

On January 17, 2002, Boumediene’s hands and feet were placed in shackles, and he was put on a military plane en route to Guantanamo Bay. …

Two weeks later, in his State of the Union address, President Bush touted the arrests in Bosnia to show early progress in the war on terror.

He needed to be able to tout something. And for that he had five men taken to Guantanamo. And left to rot there for more than seven years.