Trial Overseer Cites 'Abusive' Methods Against 9/11 SuspectBy Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 14, 2009; Page A01
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."
"We tortured
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.
Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . 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 said.
more News Analysis
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: January 14, 2009
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But a next question is sure to be how much risk to American safety the Obama administration is willing to take. In a series of moves this week, including Ms. Crawford’s interview published Wednesday by The Washington Post, Bush administration officials seemed to be making a public case that closing the Guantánamo center would be perilous. Ms. Crawford, the senior official in the Pentagon’s military commission system for prosecuting detainees, told Bob Woodward of The Post that Mr. Qahtani remained “a very dangerous man.”
Until the remarks by the official, Susan J. Crawford, it had sometimes seemed an academic debate whether a new administration would encounter detainees who might be considered too dangerous to release but who could not be prosecuted. This was a flesh-and-blood case: a Saudi, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was kept in isolation and cold rooms, deprived of sleep, made to do dog tricks and broken by sexual and other humiliations too numerous to list. But Mr. Qahtani may also have been the would-be “20th hijacker,” willing, perhaps, to wield a box cutter back on Sept. 11, 2001.
“We’re inheriting a very difficult situation,” the vice president-elect, Joseph R. Biden Jr., said on Wednesday in an interview in Washington. “Not all of it is clear cut.”
<...>
But the fallout from Ms. Crawford’s remarks went beyond implications for the Obama administration’s efforts at prosecution. Some on Capitol Hill said the fallout added pressure to the calls for an investigation of detention and interrogation practices, perhaps by a national investigative commission, or for an inquiry into whether American officials may have committed crimes.
moreNews Analysis
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: January 16, 2009
WASHINGTON — Just 14 months ago, at his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey frustrated and angered some senators by refusing to state that waterboarding, the near-drowning technique used on three prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, is in fact torture.
This week, at his confirmation hearing, Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general-designate, did not hesitate to express a clear view. He noted that waterboarding had been used to torment prisoners during the Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
“We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam,” Mr. Holder said. “Waterboarding is torture.”
In the view of many historians and legal authorities, Mr. Holder was merely admitting the obvious. He was agreeing with the clear position of his boss-to-be, President-elect Barack Obama, and he was giving an answer that almost certainly was necessary to win confirmation.
Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.
<...>
“There’s a moral, legal and practical obligation of the United States to follow this allegation in good faith wherever it leads,” said Juan E. Méndez, a veteran human rights lawyer who is president of the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York.
Where such an inquiry might lead is an unsettling question for departing Bush administration officials, who have long worried that aggressive policies could make them vulnerable to civil or criminal liability.
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