We tortured

It's a matter of public record and not open for interpretation. This, I think, is about as official as official can be: The very federal government official who decides if any given Guantánamo Bay detainee will be tried for what he's charged for, a current senior Bush administration official, says the United States government has tortured.

Susan Crawford is the convening authority of the Guantánamo military commissions, a Robert Gates appointee. She was formerly appointed by Bush 41 to be inspector general for the Department of Defense under Cheney's tenure as its secretary. Before that, she was appointed by Reagan to be general counsel for the Department of the Army. She's not what anyone would consider a lefty dove.

The Washington Post published today Bob Woodward's interview with Crawford. In that interview, she said, "We tortured Qahtani." This Qahtani guy, for those who don't know, is Mohamed al-Kahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker," a terrorist who might have personally participated in 9/11 had he not been denied entry into the US in August 2001 by an INS inspector at Orlando International Airport.

Notice that Crawford didn't say we "enhanced-interrogation-techniqued" Kahtani. She said we tortured him. That is the very word she used, "tortured." She elaborates, "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution]." Here's more from The Washington Post (emphasis added):

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. 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, she said.

Further details about what happened to Kahtani are in The Washington Post's article.

This should end all doubt that might remain that the Bush administration has tortured detainees at Guantánamo. Since this fact is clearly established, we can now correctly state that the Bush administration has committed a war crime, perhaps many instances of this war crime. One is too many, really.

As everyone hopefully knows, evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible in a court of law. This means that even if you have evidence that suggests a person is responsible for a grave, despicable act against innocent Americans, if you obtained that evidence using torture, the judge cannot consider it. Period. The reason is that torture too often gets you unreliable information. And the idea that torture is simply disgustingly wrong, of course, goes without saying.

If officials in the Bush administration are using torture to gather evidence against detainees under the pretense of preventing terrorist attacks against us and prosecuting guilty parties, and evidence obtained in such a way is not legally admissible in a court of law, then it stands to reason that the Bush administration is utterly incapable of doing what it promised it would do. And I'd say that's certainly an understatement. Any claim that the Bush administration did a good job dealing with terrorism, or any variation on that claim, ought to seem obviously flawed to anyone with a modicum of reasoning skills.

The conclusion is that we should convict someone of war crimes. Anyone who authorized or enabled this treatment of Kahtani must be convicted. The interrogators should be convicted. Whoever came up with this whole program, knowingly including torture in the program, should be convicted. I want to see people punished for blundering the job of protecting us against terrorist attacks and committing such grave offenses against other human beings on my behalf in the name of security and the "war on terrorism."

Let this soak in.