Susan Crawford

Lawyer and judge Susan J. Crawford was appointed to be the convening authority for military commissions for the Bush Administration in February of 2007. As such, she became the top authority on determining whether suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay should be brought to trial. In May of 2008, Crawford recommended that the charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man suspected of being the absent "20th hijacker" in the 9-11 terrorist plot, be dropped. In a January 2009 interview with The Washington Post, Crawford revealed that al-Qahtani had been subjected to torture while being interrogated at Guantanamo Bay and that was why she had not recommended that he be prosecuted.The Washington Post: Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official Page 1 (January 14, 2009)

"The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent...You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge."The Washington Post: Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official Page 1 (January 14, 2009)

"It did shock me. I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it."The Washington Post: Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official Page 2 (January 14, 2009)