Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you . . .  torture.

According to Susan Crawford (that’s not her in the picture), the Bush administration official in charge of deciding which Guantanamo prisoners to bring to trial, the combination of interrogation methods used on Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been the twentieth 9/11 hijacker had he not been denied entry to the country a month before that, amounted to torture.

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “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” to call it torture, she said.

What were these methods?

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. “Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister.”

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

This is madness.  Yes, I know she said it was the combination of methods, not any one method.  But the only thing I can see in there that even approaches torturre is the consecutive days of lengthy interrogations.

Standing naked?  Insults to his mother and sister?  Women’s underwear?  Are you kidding me?

When the lefty nutcakes were defining panties on the head as torture, I could easily dimisss their hysteria.  Now that an administation official has done so . . . not so easily dismissed.  DrewM at Ace’s has it exactly right when he says “the left has a newly minted hero today.”

And Crawford justifies it based on adverse effects to his health.  In other words, we have an enemy, we know exactly what his mental weaknesses are, so make damned sure you don’t exploit those mental weaknesses.  Because that might just upset him enough that his health is adversely affected.

At this rate, we are going to define lawful interrogation right out of existence.

You know, if the Left was so bothered by things like this, why weren’t they actually screaming for us to invade Iraq for the sole reason to put an end to real torture and political killing?  Under their standards, what was going on inside Iraq under Hussein, far greater in both substance and scope,  was so monstrous, how could they possibly argue that we not take action for that reason alone?  What made the lives of those kids Sean Penn visited in the Iraqi hospital before the war any more important than the lives of the kids already held in his prison for children?  Here’s what weapons inspector Scott Ritter said about that prison, even as he was trying to foment opposition to war with Iraq:

The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.

“Waging peace.”  Really?  I’ll grant you he was lobbying against war.  But waging peace?  The status quo was hardly “peace.”