WASHINGTON: Mohamed al-Qahtani had every intention on September 11 of joining the hijackers in their mission and in death, the US military says.
He was turned away when he tried to enter the United States, however, and the Saudi national was captured three months later, in December 2001, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, military officials say.
Sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he didn’t crack under normal questioning techniques. So to break him, interrogators, with the approval of US defence secretary Donald H Rumsfeld, employed harsher methods to humiliate and convince him of the futility of resistance.
According to investigators reporting to a US Senate panel on Wednesday, the interrogators forced him to wear a brassiere, forced him to wear women’s thong underpants on his head, forced him onto a leash and made him crawl like a dog.
They told him his mother and sisters were whores, told him he was homosexual and that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs and forced him to stand naked in front of women.
He was kept in solitary for 160 days, from August 8, 2002, to January 15, 2003. In one stretch, during 48 days out of 54, he was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day.
Air Force Lt Gen Randall M. Schmidt, who led the investigation into the treatment of al-Qahtani and other Guantanamo prisoners, said, “He admitted to being the 20th hijacker, and he expected to fly on United Airlines flight 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania). He proved to have intimate knowledge of future plans.’’
Some, particularly Democrats and human rights groups, fear the use of such techniques has cost the US its moral high ground and will make other governments and groups less likely to respect US soldiers when they are captured…