Robert Scheer: The Tortured Law on Torture

[babylonsister]

The Tortured Law on Torture
truthdig
By Robert Scheer

May 14, 2008


Ah yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our President in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation's commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called September 11 attacks' twentieth hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the "evidence" he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.

That fact, of course, will not compel President Bush to cut the tortured prisoner loose. After all, Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani has only been held in confinement for more than six years without being charged with a crime, and without being allowed to confront his accusers in a court of law.

The fact that the information produced is worthless--as evidenced by Qahtani, once driven insane, naming everyone around him in the camp as a major Al-Qaeda operative--will not deter those who condone torture. But others expert in these matters, including presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, will recoil from such tactics.

It was the treatment of Qahtani and other prisoners, as witnessed by horrified US Navy Department investigators at Guantànamo, that got the attention of the Navy's then-General Counsel Alberto J. Mora. In one of those all-too-rare examples of true heroism that makes one proud to be an American, Mora challenged the Bush Administration to practice the human rights standards that America proclaims to the world. But Bush would stay true to his own values: "Any activity we conduct is within the law," Bush stated in November 2005, adding, "We do not torture."

What was it then? As the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported in 2006, citing the Army's own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being subjected to documented beatings and other physical abuse, was put through an S&M routine calculated to drive him mad, which it accomplished:

"Qahtani had been subjected to 160 days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on 48 of 54 days, for 18 to 20 hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called 'invasion of space by a female;' forced to wear women's underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash and told that his mother was a whore.' "

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080526/scheer