One Life Inside Gitmo

As for Detainee 063, according to his lawyer, he is a broken man. In her first meetings with al-Qahtani, says Gutierrez, his mind wandered, and he engaged in rambling monologues. She found him fearful and at times disoriented. Her descriptions called to mind reports by FBI agents who said al-Qahtani, upon arriving at Guantánamo in 2002, resisted interrogation and so was subjected to intimidation by a military dog and "intense isolation over three months" that led to "behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours)."

When al-Qahtani still didn't break, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized a series of harsh interrogation techniques for him. Concern about the legality of some of those methods prompted the Pentagon to outlaw their use in January 2003, barely a month after Rumsfeld authorized them. Gutierrez says al-Qahtani "painfully described how he could not endure the months of isolation, torture and abuse, during which he was nearly killed, before making false statements to please his interrogators." As documented in the interrogation log, at one point al-Qahtani became seriously dehydrated because of his refusal to drink water regularly, causing him to be hospitalized and his heart rate to drop to 35 beats a minute.

According to the Pentagon, al-Qahtani admitted that he had been sent to the U.S. by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 attacks, and that he had met bin Laden on several occasions. Al-Qahtani also confirmed that he had received terrorist instruction at two al-Qaeda training camps and met with numerous senior al-Qaeda leaders. Says the Pentagon's Whitman: "The record clearly shows that al-Qahtani is a dangerous individual who should be held to account for his acts of terrorism."