Dartblog

It is a little stunning that it took so long.

Mohammad al-Qahtani, a captured and worn and non-trivial al Qaeda operative, is the prime suspect for the infamous “20th hijacker” position, as investigated by the United States’ domestic security and intelligence agencies. The which is cause for celebration in itself, for if al-Qahtani were not captured and worn and locked away at the military’s Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he would have been the likely warhead astride a Mk. 747 missile bearing down on some new steel coven of innocent American civilians. Instead, when his plane landed in Orlando, Florida in August of 2001, he was detected and refused entry. He was captured in Afghanistan several months after the attack, and Detainee No. 063 now withers at Gitmo, his al Qaeda connections proven beyond any doubt. al-Qahtani is, in fact, one of the Very Important Jihadists at Guantanamo Bay. He’s been talking.

But when he was captured in early 2002 and brought to Guantanamo Bay, he was reported as being highly uncooperative in interrogations. Resistance is, of course, the short-term standard operating procedure for captured al Qaeda operatives. There are books and they advise obstinance. But it doesn’t last when held visions of clerics and virgins and long-nosed Israelis and cubicle-dwelling Americans all in fiery cells begin to fade… when hope for the jihad begins to fade. And it always does, since this is a war and America is winning and al Qaeda is losing and the captured terrorists at Gitmo will not be rescued.

With time and interrogation Mohammad al-Qahtani folded. News reports that bubbled in the strange space between Hard News and Weird News reported that the bangs and shrieks of one Christina Aguilera were used as coercive mechanisms at overseas terrorist prisons operated by the United States armed forces. al-Qahtani was one purported victim. He was also subjected to the cultural tactics, deeply and proudly violative of Sharia, of being smeared with a ketchup-like substance under the false impression that it was menstrual blood. His cell was wallpapered with photographs of 9/11 victims. In order to offend his sensibilities, he was forced to “wear pictures of half-naked women strung around his neck”. (Note: Pictures strung about the neck cannot be seen by the wearer.) The terrorist was asked to bark that he may “elevate his social status up to that of a dog.” News outlets have even reported that latex examination gloves were inflated with air and used to slap al-Qahtani, since Islam expressly forbids situation comedies circa 1940.

The tactics may sound tawdry, but the deliberate intent is to foment an atmosphere where the scaffold of jihad—where taboos and sensitivities and suicidal piety—were made to be meaningless, that the flame which animates such barbaric acts might be extinguished, allowing for a traditional encounter between criminal and cop. That flame, which burned away thousands of American lives, was extinguished through almost purely visceral means: Upsetting the eyes and the pride. Reports that al-Qahtani was sleep deprived aside (the tactic, anyway, is permitted under the most conservative international law) he underwent what was deemed necessary to cause him to sing, and sang he did—more beautifully than Aguilera ever has.

The Pentagon has reported that al-Qahtani’s early confessions resulted in specific and detailed data items considered “valuable information [which helped] the U.S. to understand the recruitment of terrorist operatives, logistics and other planning aspects of the 9/11 terrorist attack.” He also provided the names of approximately thirty high-level al Qaeda soldiers who were Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, all held in highest confidence by the terrorist leader. He told military interrogators of his direct communications with Khaled Sheik Mohammed, and that he had met bin Laden. He told of the details of two of al Qaeda’s training camps.

Now, these years later, al-Qahtani has an attorney from a New York-based nonprofit. At first he refused to see her, but once she submitted to shielding from him her shameful female visage with a hejab, a meeting was arranged. They conspired, and al-Qahtani promptly proclaimed torture. Everything he had said, he now claimed, was wrong. Prosecutors are familiar with this tactic from mob trials, since claims of aggression fan below and delay all other trials based upon interrogation data from the aggression claimant. Americans are now even more familiar with it from al Qaeda operatives. Because the news travels everywhere, and suddenly al-Qahtani could construct a narrative that fit perfectly with the one the media had developed. Its veracity matters nothing. It fits. It fulfills. And the difficult work of breaking down terrorists, of sapping their indoctrination to get at the brain below, of instilling the unique feeling of deep despair that results in life-saving confessions, has been reversed.

It is a little stunning that it took so long. The relentless, plodding story of abuse-by-offense has been going in the media for many years. It is only now, more than three years after the interrogation of al-Qahtani [PDF] that he’s claiming torture. He was useful; now he is an empowered force to be reckoned with. The press, too broadminded to take its own side in the fight, oozes to tell his tale with pathos. We’ve lost another one. A new media star is born; a major informant is lost, because, evidently, we just aren’t sure if we ought to be fighting this war.

It is more than a little stunning, this whole story, but I suppose in one of its notes families of those killed in New York and Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11 can find small refuge: American soldiers did the right thing. They placed all those photos, those many photos of death, in the terrorist’s cell.