Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession By Andy Worthington

Forget the outgoing President’s lame, reality-defying farewell speech, and Dick Cheney’s last-ditch attempts to claim that the administration in which he served as Vice President never engaged in torture. The Bush era came to an end last Wednesday when, in one short interview, Susan J. Crawford, the senior Pentagon official overseeing the Military Commissions at Guantánamo — the novel system of trials for terror suspects that was conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — condemned the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies, and paved the way for criminal proceedings against senior administration officials, more acutely than anyone had managed before her.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was defense secretary for George W. Bush’s father, has served as the Convening Authority for the Commissions since February 2007. In the interview, with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, she explained why, last May, she had decided in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi accused of trying and failing to become one of the 9/11 operatives, that she would not refer his case for prosecution.

“We tortured Qahtani,” she told Woodward. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”