One Life Inside Gitmo

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Having spent more than 30 hours in December and January speaking through an interpreter with al-Qahtani at Guantánamo, Gutierrez, the first person to report publicly on his mind-set since his story broke, says he now recants his previous incriminating statements, claiming they were extracted under extreme duress. That may not be surprising. Nor was Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman's response: that "the al-Qaeda training manual specifically encourages those captured to make false claims of abuse." But the more that becomes known about the al-Qahtani case--a unique window into the otherwise secretive practices at Guantánamo--the greater the government's vulnerability to challenges to its conduct there. Lawyers for some 60 Guantánamo prisoners told TIME they plan this week to file in a Washington federal appeals court a motion questioning the legality of their clients' detention, based in part on the log of al-Qahtani's questioning that appeared on TIME.com last week. "Using the interrogation logs, we can now demonstrate as fact that statements procured from a man who was abused and tortured have been used to justify the continued detention of Guantánamo prisoners," said Marc Falkoff, a lawyer with Covington & Burling who represents 17 of those detainees. Says Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, another of the lawyers in the case (al-Odah v. United States): "Mr. al-Qahtani's statements were elicited in a manner that undermines their credibility entirely. The logs reveal that, with a single day's exception, al-Qahtani was the victim of sleep deprivation that usually lasted a full 20 hours a day for seven straight weeks."

Meanwhile, Gutierrez, a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York City--based nonprofit organization that al-Qahtani's father approached last year for help, has challenged his detention in federal court in Washington on the grounds that it is illegal. According to Gutierrez, al-Qahtani insists that he is innocent and that he made many false statements to appease his interrogators. She says he told her he had informed interrogators of his false declarations, a contention supported in part by his interrogation log.

A Pentagon report in July 2005 found that al-Qahtani had been subjected to treatment that was--though not a violation of Defense Department policy-- cumulatively "abusive and degrading." It specifically recommended that the commandant of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, be reprimanded for failing to adequately monitor the interrogation of a high-value detainee, believed to be al-Qahtani. But Miller's superior, Southern Command Commander General Bantz Craddock, decided against the reprimand. Congress last December passed a provision, sponsored by Senator John McCain of Arizona, that bars U.S. personnel from engaging in "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of detainees anywhere. The provision came too late for al-Qahtani; it's not clear how much protection it will afford prisoners like him who are subjected to such handling in the future.