U.S. official says Guantanamo detainee tortured: report
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon official overseeing the tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
"We tortured Qahtani," Susan Crawford said in an interview with the newspaper. "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 also worked in the Reagan administration, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have said that the United States does not torture.
Crawford told The Post the techniques used in Qahtani's case were authorized but applied in an overly aggressive and too persistent manner.
"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, Crawford told the newspaper.
U.S. defense officials said a review of Qahtani's 2002 interrogation concluded that the methods were lawful at the time. But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said investigators did note the "cumulative effect" of aggressive interrogations on the alleged 20th hijacker.
"The application of the techniques in a cumulative sort of way raised some concerns," he said without providing details.
The Defense Department no longer allows those "special interrogation techniques," which Whitman said were used on a very small number of detainees at the prison in Cuba.
AMNESTY CALLS FOR RELEASE
Crawford dismissed war crimes charges against Qahtani in May 2008 but he remains at Guantanamo. Crawford said he is dangerous and that she would be hesitant to say 'Let him go.'
But the rights group Amnesty International called for Qahtani's release unless the U.S. government was prepared to recharge him promptly before an independent court, not a military commission.
"No information obtained under torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment should be admitted in any proceedings, except against the perpetrators of any such treatment as evidence that it occurred," Amnesty said in a statement.
"Saudi Arabian authorities should call for ... Qahtani's repatriation as long these conditions are not met."
Qahtani was denied entry into the United States a month before the September 11 attacks and was allegedly planning to be the plot's 20th hijacker, the article said. He was captured in Afghanistan in January 2002 and transported to Guantanamo.
Crawford said she sympathized with officials who were urgently gathering information in the days after September 11.
"But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward," she said.
President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office next Tuesday, is expected to issue an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
But the prison, which still holds about 255 men, is unlikely to shut until U.S. officials settle legal and logistic issues, including a solution on where to house its occupants.
The Senate Armed Services Committee said last month that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's decision to authorize aggressive interrogation techniques in Guantanamo in 2002 contributed directly to the detainee abuse there and at other prisons which opened up the United States to accusations of torture.
(Reporting by Joanne Allen and David Morgan; editing by Jackie Frank)
