Tortured Guantanamo Bay Prisoner Seeks Release Of Secret Videos

A new lawsuit seeks to force the U.S. government to make public “extremely disturbing” videotapes of a Saudi national whose abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison has been called “torture” by a former Bush administration official.
The suit, filed in New York federal court on Monday, comes 10 years after the first prisoners in the United States’ global war on terror arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The prison, within a U.S. Navy base, was considered by Bush administration lawyers outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The prison was meant to house "the worst of the worst" terrorist except that almost all of those held have been released without ever being charged or tried for the crimes they were alleged to have committed.

Harsh interrogation techniques

In their lawsuit filed Monday, Lawrence Lustberg and Sandra Babcock seek to shed light on the treatment of their client Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 and was whisked to Guantanamo Bay, where government investigators later identified him as a man who had planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The case of Qahtani first came to light in 2005 when Time magazine published secret log files from Guantanamo that detailed harsh interrogation techniques on the Saudi suspect.
In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder, but on May 11 of that same year those charges were dropped. The reasons at the time were not made public.

Then light was shed upon why the charges were never brought.

In 2009, a Bush administration official revealed the reason to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:
"We tortured Qahtani," Susan J. Crawford said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

 John Yoo the former member of the Bush administration's Department of Justice who co-authored the now infamous Torture Memos which sought to give legal justification for the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Cuba as the base was considered outside of U.S. legal jurisdiction.

Part I

Part one, in which the text and history of the U.S. torture statute (18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A) is examined, mainly addresses Bybee's interpretation of the definition of torture, including the definition of severe physical and mental pain or suffering.

In the first section, the memorandum reminds the reader that the statute requires specific intent (the convention only requires general intent, but the specific intent language is found in the U.S. ratification reservation), and in citing case law precedent states that specific intent means that "the infliction of [severe] pain must be the defendant's precise objective" and reminds the reader that general intent only requires intent of the actions which would be reasonably likely to result in a violation of the statute.^[3] The article then concludes that, "even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent," but makes no attempt to explain how one can act knowing that a result is certain without intending the outcome, and instead claims that a jury would likely act contrary to law (out of misunderstanding) by finding such an individual guilty regardless.

The second section is key to the definition given by this memo of torture, yet provides the least precedent or legal reasoning of the memo sections. The memo admits difficulty in finding and clear definition for the "severe pain or suffering" required by the torture statute (which is also required by the convention). After examining the definition provided in various dictionaries, it concludes that "pain" is synonymous with "suffering" ("it is difficult to conceive of such suffering that would not involve severe physical pain"), and it selects among the many definitions and proposes that severe pain must be difficult to endure (some definitions quoted in the memo define severe pain as "inflicting discomfort"). In searching for a reference to the term in other U.S. statutes and law, it quotes from a health care law which defines "emergency condition," but merely mentions "severe pain" in passing. That statutory subsection, 8 U.S.C. section 1395w-22(d)(3)(B), defines an emergency condition as a condition "manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain) such that [one]... could reasonably expect the absence of immediate medical attention to result in placing the health of the individual... in serious jeopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part." The memorandum then concludes that severe pain necessarily be pain associated with "death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions," and does not explain the possibility left open in that statute of severe pain existing without the existence of those characteristics (and vice-versa), or the fact that the statute only loosely associates the concepts with "severe pain" as opposed to defining the term. Furthermore, even though this section spends considerable effort interpreting such terms as "or," it totally ignores parenthetical language directly relevant to the meaning of "severe pain," which states, "severe physical or mental pain or suffering(other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions)." The memo then consumes copious space to find the most strict definition of mental pain and prolonged mental harm, which is nonetheless already defined by the statute. It concludes that "prolonged" must be a duration of months or even years. It also erroneously states that the statute requires long-term mental harm to accompany mental or physical pain.

These memos not only violated U.S. law but were also in contravention of the Geneva Convention which sets the legal frame work for the treatment of prisoners of war but also violated the UN Convention on Human Rights. Both of which the U.S. is a signatory.