Daily Archives: Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Detainee Was Tortured, A Bush Official Confirms

The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration’s system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee who has sometimes been described as “the 20th hijacker” in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The public record of the Guantánamo interrogation of the detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has long included what officials labeled abusive techniques, including exposure to extreme temperatures and isolation, but the Pentagon has resisted acknowledging that his treatment rose to the level of torture.

But the official, Susan J. Crawford, told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that she had concluded that his treatment amounted to torture when she reviewed military charges against him last year. In May she decided that the case could not be referred for trial but provided no explanation at the time.

“His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution, Ms. Crawford was quoted as saying in an article published in The Post on Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/us/14gitmo.html?_r=1&hp

And who is Susn J. Crawford?

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…[and] a life-long Republican

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011303372.html

We’ve long known, of course, that repeated claims from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Pentagon officials, etc., that US policy under their administration did not countenance torture was a lie poorly hidden behind a legal strategy of defining ‘torture’ so narrowly that committing it was effectively impossible.

But the propaganda campaign surrounding this issue has not relied simply on redefining torture into a legally and logically meaningless term by Addington, Yoo and others.  This campaign, carried out through the numerous agencies and voices who function to propagandize for the RNC and movement, have argued and continue to argue that ”Of course the US doesn’t torture but even if it did, it woul be justified in protection of American citizens and as America hasn’t been attacked again, clearly the torture that the US has not done would be morally upstanding and proper even if it did it.”   Steadfast, clear-sighted, brave America at its best, perhaps.

We’ll watch now and see the various strategies that will be used to smear and discredit Ms. Crawford.  The Pentagon statement (quoted above) is boilerplate “Our own various thorough investigations cleared us already” and one has to simply expect it in the manner of a lawyer’s statement about his client’s innocence.