An independent investigation into the detention facility at Gunatanamo Bay housing terrorists captured by the US only turned up three violations of Army regulations and the Geneva Conventions, the AP reports today. None of these involved torture of any kind, although one investigator found that the totality of techniques used on one prisoner qualified as "abusive":

The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, described the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It was learned later that he had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001 but was turned away by an immigration agent at the Orlando, Fla., airport. Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was in the airport at the same time, officials have said.

Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

Still, he said, "No torture occurred."

Al-Qahtani was provided food, water and medical care, he said. Together these techniques are degrading and abusive, he said. FBI agents raised their concerns about the techniques to Miller, and he should have monitored them, but he apparently took no action, Schmidt said.

As the data from this Senate hearing gets disseminated, watch to see where the overall violations get reported. In this article by the AP's John Lumpkin and Lolita Baldor, the fact that investigators could only find three violations out of thousands of interrogations performed at Gitmo gets held until the eleventh paragraph, about halfway through the report. Instead of putting this information into its proper context, Lumpkin and Baldor instead offer up some of the more sensational interrogation techniques used by Gitmo intelligence operatives:

Interrogators subjected a suspected terrorist to abusive and degrading treatment, forcing him to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog, military investigators reported Wednesday, saying that justified their call for disciplinary action.

Yes, the lead for this story is that we made an Islamist wear a bra, dance with another man, and act like a dog. That's the level of "abuse" that has captured the imagination of Dick Durbin and the rest of the Left that equates Camp X-Ray with Dachau. When trying to get information about future attacks and terrorist networks that could save American lives -- and British lives, and French lives, etc -- these tactics seem rather mundane and unobjectionable, except to those who want each one of the detainees to be treated like an American criminal suspect instead of an enemy during wartime.

Let's remind people what the Islamists have in mind for those whom they oppose:

Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands, is accused of shooting and stabbing Mr van Gogh to death in broad daylight on a street in Amsterdam last November, before nearly decapitating him and impaling his corpse with a knife, which secured a five-page note declaring a holy war.

That's just if they encounter people on a face-to-face basis. Otherwise, they would much prefer to blow up subways, trains, and buses as they did in London last week, killing dozens and perhaps more than that. In Madrid, in Morocco, and in Turkey, they killed hundreds in similar fashion. The man at the center of this investigation, Mohamed al-Qahtani, only missed out on his chance to board Flight 93 and perhaps help the terrorists succeed in attacking the Capitol or the White House because of a sharp-eyed immigration agent in 2001.

We lost 3,000 of our fellow citizens in that attack, and these Islamofacist lunatics would like nothing better than to add thousands more to that number. Making him dance a jig in a bra with another man while barking like a dog in order to prevent that sounds like a damned good trade to me.

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» Tortured reasoning from protein wisdom

Tom Elia makes the case that Ted Kennedy and Carl Levin are wrong to label forcible interrogation techniques used at Gitmo "torture,"-- something the two grandstanding liberal Senators have no problem doing in this AP report -&...

Tracked on July 13, 2005 5:31 PM

» i Have Been Tortured from annika's journal
Yesterday, Captains Quarters linked to the results of an independent investigation that found only three violations of Army Regulations and the Geneva Conventions* at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Rand... [Read More]

Tracked on July 14, 2005 12:29 PM