Mohammed Al-Qahtani’s interrogations at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003, which included sleep deprivation and exposure to cold had been described by officials as abusive.
But the Pentagon has always refused to acknowledge that the treatment of the Saudi national amounted to torture.
However Susan J Crawford, the senior official at the Pentagon responsible for prosecuting detainees has told The Washington Post that she decided last May not to refer his case for trial because she had concluded that he had been tortured.
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“His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” Ms. Crawford, a retired military judge, told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.
She said she came to the conclusion after studying the combination of techniques used on him which she said had a ‘medical impact.’
“The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent,” she said.
“You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she added.
Military documents show that Mr. al-Qahtani’s repeated interrogations included prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity and exposure to cold. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator and to act like a dog, obeying such commands as “stay,” “come” and “bark.”
A Pentagon inquiry in 2005 found that the methods were “degrading and abusive.” Mr. Qahtani’s lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York said they left him a broken man who has attempted suicide.
He had been denied entry to the US in August 2001, a month before the attacks on the Twin Towers. He was later captured in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo in 2002 where he was accused of plotting the attacks, alongside five other Guantanamo detainees.
Military prosecutors sought the death penalty but in May, Ms Crawford decided not to refer his case for trial. At the time she refused to offer an explanation.
Today she defended his continued detention, describing him as a “muscle hijacker”.
“There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country,” Ms. Crawford said in the interview. “What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go,’ ” she added
Ms Crawford,who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration, and was the Pentagon’s inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Pentagon said that more than a dozen investigations into Mr al-Qahtani’s treatment had concluded that the interrogations were lawful.
“However, subsequent to those reviews,” the statement said, “the department adopted new and more restrictive policies and improved oversight procedures for interrogation and detention operations.
“Some of the aggressive questioning techniques used on al-Qahtani, although permissible at the time, are no longer allowed in the updated Army field manual,” the statement said.
In November, military prosecutors indicated they would file new charges with Ms Crawfor,.based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques.
But Ms Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, told MR Woodward she would not allow the prosecution to go forward.
Peace and Justice Post 
Holding Bush Accountable
January 17, 2009by Elizabeth Holtzman | The Nation, January 15, 2009
President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and “extraordinary rendition,” and ending practices, like signing statements, that seek to undo laws.
While these steps are all crucial, however, it is not enough merely to cease the abuses of power and apparent criminality that marked the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration. We cannot simply shrug off the constitutional and criminal misbehavior of the administration, treat it as an aberration and hope it won’t happen again. The misbehavior was not an aberration–aspects of it, particularly the idea that the president is above the law, were present in Watergate and in the Iran/Contra scandal. To fully restore the rule of law and prevent any repetition of Bush’s misconduct, the abuses of his administration must be directly confronted. As Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen–recently tapped by Obama to head his Office of Legal Counsel–wrote in Slate last March, “We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals.”
What we need to do is conceptually simple. We need to launch investigations to get at the central unanswered questions of Bush’s abuse of power, commence criminal proceedings and undertake institutional, statutory and constitutional reforms. Perhaps all these things don’t need to be done at once, but over time–not too much time–they must take place. Otherwise, we establish a doctrine of presidential impunity, which has no place in a country that cherishes the rule of law or considers itself a democracy. Bush’s claim that the president enjoys virtually unlimited power as commander in chief at a time of war–which Vice President Dick Cheney defiantly reasserted just last month–brought us perilously close to military dictatorship.
As the former district attorney in Brooklyn, New York, I know the price society pays for a doctrine of impunity. Failure to prosecute trivializes and encourages the crimes. The same holds true of political abuses–failure to hold violators accountable condones the abuse and entrenches its acceptability, creating a climate in which it is likely to be repeated. The doctrine of impunity suggests, too, that there is a dual system of justice–one for the powerful and one for ordinary Americans. Because the concept of equal justice under the law is the foundation of democracy, impunity for high-level officials who abuse power and commit crimes erodes our democracy.
An impeachment proceeding against President Bush would have been the proper forum to expose the full scope of his abuses and to impose punishment. That obviously didn’t happen, but investigations and prosecutions can still provide the vast civics lesson that an impeachment process would have given our nation.
There is another important reason for not “moving on.” On January 20, Barack Obama will take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, which requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Much as President Obama might like to avoid controversy arising from investigations and prosecutions of high-level Bush administration officials, he cannot let them get away with breaking the law without violating his oath. His obligation to pursue justice in these cases is all the more serious given his acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture–which is a federal crime–and the vice president’s recent admission of his involvement in and approval of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
Moreover, under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, our government is obliged to bring to justice those who have violated the conventions. Although Bush smugly ignored his constitutional duty to enforce treaty obligations and laws that punish detainee mistreatment, Obama cannot follow the same lawless path.
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Tags:Bush administration, Convention Against Tortur, criminal misbehavior, criminal proceedings, Guantanamo, President George W. Bush, President Obama, secret prisons, torture, waterboarding
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