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Only ABC picked up on the day's other terrorism-related story from the Washington Post. Jan Crawford Greenburg came up with an explanation of the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani that can only be described as tortuous. The Post covered the decision by Susan Crawford, a Pentagon official, not to put al-Qahtani on trial because torture had been used to interrogate him. The Guantanamo Bay inmate is suspected of being the so-called 20th hijacker on September 11th, 2001. Crawford Greenburg tried to explain how Crawford's findings of torture squared with the Bush Administration's insistence that We Do Not Torture, to use Vice President Dick Cheney's words.
This was Crawford Greenburg's explanation. The specific authorized techniques used on al-Qahtani--"sleep deprivation, isolation, being threatened with dogs"--are not torture. When they are applied in a fashion that is "too persistent and too aggressive" they are. So the "high-ranking officials" who approved the techniques were not torturers. Those who "carried them out, out there in the field," were.
And by the way, has Zacarias Moussaoui not already pleaded guilty to being the missing 20th hijacker anyway? In al-Qahtani, the interrogators seemed to have been torturing the wrong man.
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