Torturous Civil Rights Activists

9 March, 2006. 853 words.

By Thomas Krehbiel

I’m not one to go around trumpeting “patriotism” all over the place. For example, I didn’t put an American flag on my car after 9/11. I was pretty confident people would be able to figure out which country I belonged to without it, and anyway it was a little too Orwellian for my tastes. On the other hand, I do believe that living and working in America implies a responsibility to avoid situations that actively undermine our national interests. I consider one of those national interests to be, “don’t let terrorists kill Americans.” Apparently, Time magazine and the Center for Constitutional Rights don’t share this sentiment.

Last week on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I found a link to a Time magazine article about Mohammad al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” of 9/11, which brought out my inner wingnut. I learned that Qahtani has recently recanted his confessions about Al Qaeda and its operatives because, he says, he had to lie to stop the “brutal torture” (Time’s words) inflicted on him by his interrogators. This claim coincidentally comes after his father in Saudi Arabia managed to get him a lawyer from the civil rights advocacy group Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) (a patriotic organization whose other recent work includes litigation against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison - Time didn’t mention that).

I don’t buy Qahtani’s story for one second.

I’ll admit that I’m assuming the government made the right call when they nabbed this guy. If there was any reason to believe otherwise, Time did not present it. They simply repeated the government’s story of how and why Qahtani was captured. (Which leads me to think that, like CCR, Time must also oppose the incarceration of practicing international terrorists, presumably because it violates their American civil rights. Perhaps Time would prefer sending strongly-worded letters of condemnation instead.)

When you read the article, you’ll see that Time buys Qahtani’s story completely, speaking at great length about broken, abused, innocent Mohammad, and we are made to feel quite sorry for this poor victim of America’s Muslim Witch Hunt.

Time went on to publish a lengthy portion of a secret interrogation log (PDF) that describes some of what Qahtani went through. My first reaction when I saw it was, how the hell did Time magazine get this guy’s interrogation log and why the hell are they publishing it?? Talk about “aid and comfort to the enemy.” It’s things like this that keep me from completely discounting the Bush administration’s repeated accusations that the media helps our enemies… in this case, they are. (It would not surprise me to learn that the legal activists at CCR “leaked” the information to the press in order to help their quest to set all the terrorists in Gitmo free.)

I’m fairly open-minded, so I entertained the notion that perhaps Qahtani really was just an innocent victim in all this. With that in mind, I read the entire log of Qahtani’s treatment, some 83 pages, covering a time period of about a month and a half at the end of 2002, looking for anything that might be considered “torture.” By my definition, I found nothing that came close. It was all your standard, garden-variety interrogation; the kind of stuff you might see on a particularly good episode of Law & Order. Sure, there were a lot of psychological tricks, but no hot pokers or racks or amputated fingers. I remain convinced that everyone who claims America “tortures” detainees has no concept of what real torture is… they are far too insulated from the real violence that occurs around the world.

But I digress. Back to Time’s irresponsibility. Thanks to publishing this log, all the terrorists out there with Internet connections can relax, knowing that if they get caught, they’ll just have to sit tight and wait through the unspeakable torture of… looking at pictures of swimsuit models. (I am not making that up.) I suppose that’s a pretty big deal to a devout Muslim, but still, it’s not quite as bad as, say, sawing a journalist’s head off with a knife. Maybe that’s just my corrupt Western thinking. Anyway, after enduring this treatment, eventually a civil rights activist will come along to cheerfully help free the terrorist so he can continue his war against the West. Good deal!

In the log, I also looked for anything that might be evidence that Qahtani was wrongly accused. The log showed that he routinely declared hunger strikes, struggled with MPs, argued and spat at his interrogators. Those don’t sound like the actions of an innocent man genuinely interested in obtaining his own freedom. As was pointed out numerous times in the log, they sound like the actions of an Al Qaeda operative following the Al Qaeda counter-interrogation manual to the letter.

But I suppose even people who fully intend to kill thousands of civilian men, women, and children without any remorse shouldn’t have their precious civil rights violated. Start writing those sternly-worded letters, everyone. One day, it might be our only weapon against the terrorist army.

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