Obama’s Torture Dilemma

The incoming Obama administration is coming under new pressure to investigate the treatment of terror detainees following a surprise public admission by a top Pentagon official that a high-profile detainee was "tortured" at Guantánamo Bay.

In an unusually candid interview, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for the U.S. military commissions, told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that a number of "enhanced" interrogation techniques used against one Guantánamo detainee—Mohammed al-Qahtani—"met the legal definition of torture."

"We tortured al-Qahtani," Crawford told Woodward.

Just last weekend, Obama signaled in a television interview that he was not inclined to launch sweeping new criminal investigations of detainee treatment and interrogations that took place under the Bush administration. "My instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing," Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

But Crawford's comments could force the new administration to look backward, as well. As the senior Pentagon official in charge of the military commissions, Crawford had direct access to internal files on Qahtani's treatment that have never been publicly released, including practices that she says left the Saudi detainee in a "life-threatening condition."

"I expect that a next step is for the Justice Department of the new administration to take a look at all of the facts and to assess any senior-level accountability for the abuse of detainees," said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a statement to NEWSWEEK. (Levin recently released a report concluding that senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive treatment of detainees.)

Crawford's willingness to publicly use the word "torture" could have immediate legal implications. Torture is not just a violation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions; it is also a federal crime prosecutable by the Justice Department. In fact, just last week, Justice put out a press release highlighting its successful prosecution of Roy M. Belfast (a.k.a. "Chuckie Taylor"), the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, for acts of torture committed under his father's regime during the 1990s. Belfast, who headed a paramilitary organization known as the Anti-Terrorist Unit, was sentenced to 97 years in prison for acts that included burning victims with molten plastic, lit cigarettes and scalding water as well as severely beating them with firearms and shocking them with an electric device. "Our message to human rights violators, no matter where they are, remains the same: We will use the full reach of U.S. law, and every lawful resource at the disposal of our investigators and prosecutors, to hold you fully accountable for your crimes," acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich of the criminal division said in the press release.

While not nearly as gruesome, the treatment of Qahtani included a range of highly aggressive—and controversial—interrogation practices that were not authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual but were personally approved by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. These techniques included sleep deprivation, forced nudity, prolonged exposure to cold, the use of a ferocious guard dog to induce phobias and prolonged isolation. A 2005 Pentagon report documented that Qahtani was also tied to a leash and made to perform dog tricks, forced to stand naked in front of female interrogators and forced to wear a woman's bra and a thong on his head during the course of his interrogation. The report conceded that Qahtani was subjected to "degrading and abusive" treatment. But it held that there were no violations of law; the Pentagon general in charge of the review, Gen. Bantz Craddock, overruled a recommendation that the Guantánamo commander at the time, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, be disciplined for failing to properly supervise the handling of Qahtani's interrogation.