BF2S Forums Gitmo - CIA tortured people they knew were innocent

THERE is no longer any doubt that torture was used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay under George W. Bush. The president's own appointee who headed the military commissions, Susan Crawford, said so in January.

The torture was not of the sadistic comic-book type; it was rather the torture that destroys the soul and the body without leaving any physical marks: countless days and nights of sleep deprivation, freezing or heating naked prisoners, shackling and tying them in stress positions, taking people to the edge of dying by drowning, sexual abuse. The Bush administration argued that these were the only ways to get vital intelligence and that they were carried out only on the "worst of the worst".

And so the debate is about whether torture is moral and whether it works.

There is, however, another danger of using torture, especially against people captured in distant places with scarcely any evidence against them: torture risks becoming the means to determine guilt or innocence. And if you have captured an innocent man and tortured him only to find he is innocent after all, what do you do then? Does Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, admit that many of these victims were not "the worst of the worst" but simply innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and tortured nonetheless?

Until now, this scenario has only been a fear. Now we know it was a reality. An astonishing, and largely ignored, judicial ruling issued on September 17 in the case of one Fouad al-Rabiah told us that the US government knowingly tortured an innocent man to procure a false confession.

We know that an American interrogator, operating under the authority of the US government, said the following words to a detainee: "There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent."

That's from page 41 of the court memorandum and order, releasing al-Rabiah.

Al-Rabiah was captured in Pakistan in December 2001. He had an unlikely history for a top al-Qa'ida commander and strategist. He had spent 20 years at a desk job for Kuwait Airways. He was also a humanitarian volunteer for Muslim refugees. Yet informants had described him as an al-Qa'ida supporter and confidant of Osama bin Laden, and he was whisked away to Guantanamo. The informants' accounts were riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. In her ruling, judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted that "the only consistency with respect to (these) allegations is that they repeatedly change over time".

The one incriminating statement was given by another inmate after he had been subjected to sleep deprivation and coercion. So the only option left to prove that al-Rabiah had not been captured by mistake was his own confession.

The interrogators' notes, forced into the open by the court, gave the game away. In the judge's words, although "al-Rabiah's interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him", they "never believed his confessions". In fact, "the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that al-Rabiah should not have been detained".

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2009-10-11 21:55:19)