UNITED STATES: “WE TORTURED QAHTANI.”

By Claudio Cordone Reprint | | Print |

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LONDON, Jan 15 2009 (IPS) - There. A US official has finally said it. Susan Crawford, convening authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo, has admitted what Mohamed al-Qahtani, his lawyers and human rights groups have long said. Al-Qahtani, a Saudi Arabian man held in Guantanamo since 2002, was tortured there.

Torture is a crime under international law. As a party to the UN Convention against Torture, the US government has the obligation to investigate “wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction”.

Yet, CrawfordÂ’s public acknowledgement that the US has tortured al-Qahtani was not accompanied by any news of efforts to bring those responsible to justice.

So, too, in relation to the secret detention program operated under the auspices of the CIA. It is already known that detainees have also been tortured in this program. The administration admitted as much by confirming last year that it had authorized and used “water-boarding”, simulated drowning, against at least three detainees held in the program. In a series of recent interviews, Vice President Cheney has acknowledged his involvement in the approval of water-boarding. He said that if it was necessary, he would do it again.

The Vice President and other officials deny that water-boarding is torture. Their denials are based on manipulation of the law. As the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded last month, “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality”, and had relied upon “deeply flawed interpretations of US and international law”.

In a recent interview, President-elect Barack Obama said he believes that “water-boarding is torture”. January 20, then, the US will have a President who considers that torture has been committed by US officials. He will have an obligation to ensure full individual and institutional accountability. There must be no safe haven for torturers, a principle on which the US itself relied earlier this year when it prosecuted the former head of the Liberian Anti-Terrorist Unit for torture.

The President-elect also reiterated his commitment to closing the Guantanamo detention facility. But he said that this goal would “take some time” to achieve, as it would be “more difficult than I think a lot of people realize”. He stated that some of those held “may be very dangerous”, and that “some of the evidence against them may be tainted”. Closing Guantánamo, he said, would have to be done in a way “that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up”.

Lawyers for Mohamed al-Qahtani will likely be concerned by this statement. The US authorities have repeatedly alleged that al-Qahtani is a dangerous individual, while failing to bring him to trial. The prospect of a fair trial, as Susan Crawford has now admitted, has been jeopardized by al-QahtaniÂ’s treatment at the hands of his US captors.

The solution is straightforward: The US should release al-Qahtani unless it promptly recharges him and brings him to trial in accordance with international fair trial standards in an independent and impartial 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.

US officials in the “war on terror” have generally kept to the public relations mantra that all those in US custody are treated “humanely” and that “we don’t do torture”. Better late than never, Susan Crawford has gone off-message. Even better still will be a demonstration by the incoming administration of the political will to do something about it. (END/ COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Claudio Cordone, Senior Director at Amnesty International