Bush Administration official admits torture (finally)

by Jay McDonough

It's always been denied.  Bush Administration officials, when asked about war on terror detainee interrogations, would either flatly claim "We don't torture" or assert everything done has been well monitored and completely legal.  

Of course, any objective observer knows this is patently false.  So, with six days left of the Bush Administration, it's something of a surprise to read an Administration figure admitting that a Saudi national had, in fact, been tortured by American interrogators and can't be brought to trial for his purported crimes.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon 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.

Military prosecutors said in November that they would seek to refile charges against Qahtani, 30, based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques. But Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, said in the interview that she would not allow the prosecution to go forward.

"It did shock me," Crawford said. "I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it." (Link)

So, with the use of torture, the U.S. has lost it's moral standing in the world, accumulated a bunch of suspect intelligence, assisted terrorists in recruiting the next generation of anti-American jihadists, violated domestic and international laws, placed our own servicemen and women at additional risk, and can't even try the accused in a court of law.

It was policy development by a bunch of guys with a man crush for Jack Bauer. 

What happens now?  The obvious questions come from Matthew Yglesias:

We have here a legal determination that a captive in US custody was tortured. And if he was tortured, that means someone tortured him. And torture is a crime. And most likely, someone ordered the torture. And someone knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it. And as we attempt to regularize the legal status of various other people being held by the United States similar findings will be relevant to future questions about who can and can’t be prosecuted and for what. To me, it doesn’t make any sense to say that we’re going to have determinations that people were illegally tortured and yet we’re just not going to do anything about it. It’d be one thing to pardon people for this kind of thing as part of some larger legal or investigative strategy. But to just leave it hanging? If Crawford thinks Qahtani can’t be prosecuted because he was tortured, then it stands to reason that there’s someone who can be prosecuted for the torturing.

The implications here are far greater than whether Mr. Qahtani will ever stand trial for his purported crimes.  Questions about how many more detainees will never be held accountable because evidence against them is useless are unanswered. 

It's mind boggling; a member of the Bush Administration has just announced to the world that fellow officials in the Administration have broken the law and conspired to conceal it.  What should happen now that the emperor has been exposed without his clothes?

Comments

[geoff]

Not to be to conspiratorial, but what's she really up to. Isn't she a dyed in the wool GOPer, friend of Addington, water carrier etc., etc. ... ? A fit of conscience? Does this help with handing out pardons? Likely not. However just who would trust anyone of the out going crowd and it's starting maybe to look like the in going crew also.