It's About Time

According to the Washington Post, Susan B. Crawford, who's in charge of prosecuting the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, determined that the supposed "20th hijacker," Mohammed al-Qahtani, had been tortured while in US custody:

"His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

More from the WaPo:

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows."

It's about time that we fessed up. I can't be the only one who's ashamed and astonished by the fact that Americans, on an American military base, would do such things to our prisoners - even ones who tried to attack us. Part of what makes us Americans is our morality. It's disgusting and shameful and should be punished.

After 7 years of torture, Qahtani isn't the same person he was in 2001. His lawyers, according to the New York Times, say he is a "broken man" and has attempted suicide. Having read about the effects of torture on people in college and in Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine," I don't doubt that his lawyers are telling the truth.

In more practical terms, our decision to torture Qahtani prevented us from prosecuting him for his alleged crimes. So by torturing the guy we actually made ourselves less safe because now we have someone whom we can't try in a court of law, but who at one time was a grave threat to all of us. How can the interrogators have believed that what they were doing was acceptable? That it was even useful? Such a belief could only have come from the very top.

What do we do with him now? Crawford herself isn't sure. She doesn't want to just let him out on the street, and military prosecutors plan to bring other charges that rely on evidence other than the interrogations. Adding a big new wrinkle is Obama's plan to close Guantanamo Bay as soon as he can. But before he does that he's going to have to figure out what to do with people like Qahtani.

I hope that there's some sort of solution. We need to keep America safe but it undermines everything we stand for if we torture our prisoners. At the end of the day, we're safer if we use our power judiciously and not punitatively.