Saudi detainee was tortured at Guantanamo Bay

A key 9/11 suspect Mohammed al-Qahtani could escape prosecution as a senior Pentagon official has said that he was tortured in detention at the Guantanamo Bay prison, an admission that could embarrass the George W Bush administration in its last day.
    
The suspect Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national, was tortured, Susan J Crawford, a Pentagon official was quoted as saying by the Washington Post.
    
"We tortured Qahtani," Crawford said pointing out that is why she had not referred the case for prosecution.
    
The Pentagon official is the convening authority of military commissions, a new office Bush set up to try terror suspects. She is the first top Bush administration official to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
    
Crawford told The Washington Post that she did not refer the case against Qhatani because he had been subjected to so-called "special interrogation techniques" that were authorised for a brief period in 2002.
    
"His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution, Crawford was quoted as saying. All along, post 9/11, the Bush administration has maintained that no one has been tortured.
    
Qahtani, who was denied entry in the US a month before the attack was later captured in Afghanistan and flown to Guantanamo in 2002. He was interrogated over a period between November 2002 to January 2002, the Post said.
    
White House spokesperson, Dana Perino, asserted that it has never been the policy of the Bush administration to torture. "Let me just make sure it's clear, and I'll say it on the record one more time, that it has never been the policy of this president or this administration to torture," she told reporters in response to a question.

Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said interrogation techniques used on Qahtani were authorised by the then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
    
"Some of the aggressive questioning techniques used on al-Qhatani, although permissible at the time, are no longer allowed in the updated Army field manual," he said.
    
The Army published Field Manual 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, in 2006 to replace the previous manual with clearly worded doctrinal guidance on conducting military interrogations within US and international law, he said.
    
Whitman said the Defense Department has taken great efforts to ensure it conducts interrogations and detainee operations in a legal manner.
    
"We have conducted more than a dozen investigations and reviews of our detention operations, including specifically the interrogation of al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker," he said.
    
"The investigations concluded the interrogation methods used at (Guantanamo Bay), including the special interrogation techniques used with Qahtani in 2002, were legal," he said.
    
Later in the evening, the vice president, Dick Cheney, told a television news channel that the Bush Administration did not torture.
    
When asked about the Post article, Cheney said: "In terms of what the policies of the administration were, both at the White House level and then at the Defense Department, was that enhanced interrogation was okay".
    
"We had specific techniques that were approved by the Justice Department. But we don't torture, and that we would not support torture from this standpoint. It was not the policy of this administration," he said.