Guardian UK: Torturing the truth

[marmar]

Torturing the truth
After years of denials by the Bush administration, the first official admission that the US used torture at Guantánamo

Vikram Dodd
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 21.31 GMT


For years the Bush administration said it was not true, that those who claimed that torture was taking place at Guantánamo Bay, were in fact suckers for al-Qaida propaganda.

Were not the terrorists trained at camps in Afghanistan to claim ill treatment once captured? And could you really believe what a load of Muslims and human rights lawyers were saying, over officials from the US government and military? Men in uniforms and men standing on White House and Pentagon podiums, time after time said categorically that the US does not use torture.

The US military, interrogators at Guantánamo, the Bush administration from the president down through his ranks of officials and aides, all hung together in denying the allegations. Until now.

Susan Crawford, the leading official in charge of deciding whether to charge Guantánamo inmates, deserves some credit for her clear and unequivocal statement. She said that a Saudi detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was tortured, so badly that his life was endangered.

A retired judge and former official under President Reagan, Crawford was not tortured into her own confession: it was made freely to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/14/guantanamo-torture