You can tell it’s a slow news day when the Washington Post, et. al., runs another “Torture!” story.
Not a hair on a detainee has been touched since 2003/2004, but that won’t stop the mainstream press from repackaging as “Breaking News!” a rehashed interview or government report. In this case it regards Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi conspirator in the 9-11 attacks.
He was interrogated from November 2002 to January 2003 (which is in part why it’s galling for them to run this on page 1), and is admittedly dangerous, categorized as such by than none other than the official who has now levied the torture charge — one Judge Susan J. Crawford.
Of al-Qahtani, Crawford stated, “There’s no doubt in my mind he would’ve been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001… He’s a muscle hijacker. . . . He’s a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, ‘Let him go.’”
Okay, so he’s admittedly “very dangerous,” was involved in the 9-11 plot and our officials were under great pressure early on to discover what he knew.
So what was the alleged torture?
“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators.”
And,
“Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister. At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.
In other words, he was treated as the unlawful combatant (i.e., a terrorist) that he is.
Insults to his mother and sister? The horror, the horror! Made him wear a woman’s underwear? Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to insult his misogynist religious extremist mindset! (By the way, THIS is torture).
He wasn’t even waterboarded (which thousands of U.S. soldiers every year endure as part of their S.E.R.E. – Survival Evasion Resistance Escape – training.)
The report claims his resting heart rate fell to 35 beats per minute, which short of being a professional athlete (who commonly hit that mark due to their athletic training), could be dangerous, although apparently there is no further detail on this.
Nonetheless, I have a problem with making analogies between our soldiers and terrorists; between our treatment of terrorists and the tactics of terrorists.
Crawford falls into that very analogy trap:
“If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”
This is a ridiculous argument. Jihadists will, at the drop of a hat, cut the head off of a civilian like Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg (let alone a soldier), and won’t for one second stop to consider how the West treats their captives. We could give them a lifetime’s worth of Korans and soccer balls (which we do at Guantanamo) and it wouldn’t change their murderous tactics one iota. For that matter, unlawful combatants murdered Leon Klinghoffer 15 years before the world had ever seen 9-11, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and so on. Today, it’s not what we do, but what we are that enrages Islamic extremists.
For the jihadist, it doesn’t matter how we treat their captives. It does matter, conversely, that we not equate, whether in legal terms or in treatment, our lawful soldiers — who follow a moral code of war — to their unlawful soldiers — who do not.
The point of Geneva Conventions and other similar protections are to provide an incentive for uniformed soldiers to not act as bandits. If we treat bandits and terrorists in the same fashion we treat lawful soldiers we remove that incentive. We make it more likely that Cpl. So-and-so, guarding a checkpoint, will just blast away at the oncoming car, rather than take the time to determine whether a threat exists or not. For that matter, why bother giving our soldiers uniforms, or having command structures. Since we’re all equal (and equally protected) we’ll just create our own little terror cells, we’ll strap suicide vests onto our soldiers and send them out as they do.
Albeit often with good intentions, the Judge Crawfords of the world, by watering down the definition of torture or making parallels between our lawful fighters and terrorists, actually make the world more dangerous, not less.
Judge Crawford would be advised to talk to Maj. Rotunda-Miller.