The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr

Once Omar allowed himself to believe that he had acquired committed advocates, his life bent itself around his meetings with them. They had brought him back into the forward-moving world and reminded him who he was. His accounts of mistreatment emerged slowly. At the end of his first meeting with his lawyers, he mentioned, embarrassed, that he had been threatened with rape. He was convinced that Ahmad and Wilson would never return, and it suddenly occurred to him, during the interview's final moments, that this might be his last chance to speak to the world. It was easier to reveal something shameful to confessors he would never see again.

It took several more meetings for the facts to emerge. Although the U.S. government denies mistreating Omar, neither Wilson nor Ahmad ever doubted the truth of what he told them. They had read hundreds of pages of detainee accounts of torture that independently corroborated one another. A Swedish detainee described being held for a dozen hours at extremely cold temperatures and senselessly moved from cell to cell throughout the night. An Australian detainee described the use of frigid and stifling temperatures, short shackles and random beatings. A Pentagon inquiry confirmed detainee accounts of torture by sexual humiliation. A former Guantanamo interrogator described detainees being "shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial." In an internal memo, an FBI agent described finding a detainee unconscious on the floor of a room "well over a hundred degrees . . . with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." The U.S. Army's own interrogation logs documented the treatment of a Saudi detainee who was interrogated in eighteen-hour sessions for forty-eight days, put on a leash and forced to bark like a dog, given intravenous fluids and locked in a room with no toilet, stripped and straddled and sexually derided by female guards, and subjected to a staged kidnapping that involved being tranquilized, blindfolded and flown to a fake destination.

There is no scientific evidence that such coercion is better than any other kind of interrogation; it is probably worse. SERE techniques were not designed to be used in the real world; they were designed to test the psychic endurance of Air Force pilots. When the FBI sent some of its best counterterrorism agents to Guantanamo soon after the camps opened, the agents chose to use what is known as rapport-based interrogation, which apparently worked. The FBI agents found the coercive tactics used by military intelligence both disgusting and stupid: The abusive treatment instantly destabilized detainees, making the information they provided unreliable as intelligence and useless in court.

By the time Omar's lawyers took his case, it was clear that the torture methods used at Guantanamo had been directly authorized by President Bush. In January 2002, the president's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, working for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised the president that nearly all forms of torture were legal. Physical abuse was not torture unless it generated the intensity of pain associated with "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." Psychological methods were illegal only if they inflicted harm that endured for "months, or even years." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a new interrogation paradigm, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller instituted the same SERE techniques at Guantanamo that he would later bring to Abu Ghraib.

Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad have a lot of experience representing prisoners, mostly immigrant detainees and death-row inmates. "Nothing we've seen comes close to the experience of Guantanamo," says Ahmad. "Not just the treatment of detainees but the brute force of state power."

During the course of their research, the attorneys were struck by the overwhelming evidence that most of the detainees at Guantanamo are innocent. The CIA had pulled Abdurahman Khadr out of the camps not just because the detainees around him had become mentally unstable and uncommunicative, but because so few of them knew anything about Al Qaeda or the Taliban. During his debriefing, one of the first things Abdurahman told his CIA handlers was how utterly the United States had failed, in its military sweeps after the fall of the Taliban, to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. In Afghanistan, the U.S. offered cash rewards for suspected Al Qaeda members that were sometimes equivalent to several years of local wages. The American military thus made every Arab-looking person in Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunists. Warlords rounded up people and brought them en masse to American authorities. Others were turned in to settle grudges, or because they had once associated with someone from Al Qaeda. U.S. intelligence apparently took criminals and mercenaries and underpaid soldiers at their word.