There is no longer any doubt that torture was used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay under George W Bush. The president’s own appointee who headed the military commissions, Susan Crawford, said so in January this year.

The torture was not of the sadistic comic-book type; it was rather the torture that destroys the soul and the body without leaving any physical marks: countless days and nights of sleep deprivation, freezing or heating naked prisoners, shackling and tying them in stress positions, taking people to the edge of dying by drowning, sexual abuse. The Bush administration argued that these were the only ways to get vital intelligence and that they were carried out only on the “worst of the worst”. And so the debate is about whether torture is moral and whether it works.

There is, however, another danger of using torture, especially against people captured in distant places with scarcely any evidence against them: torture risks becoming the means to determine guilt or innocence. And if you have captured an innocent man and tortured him only to find he is innocent after all, what do you do then? Does Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, admit that many of these victims were not “the worst of the worst” but simply innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and tortured nonetheless?

Until now, this scenario has only been a fear. Now we know it was a reality. An astonishing, and largely ignored, judicial ruling issued on September 17 in the case of one Fouad al-Rabiah told us that the US government knowingly tortured an innocent man to procure a false confession.

We know that an American interrogator, operating under the authority of the US government, said the following words to a detainee: “There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

That’s from page 41 of the court memorandum and order, releasing al-Rabiah. Al-Rabiah was captured in Pakistan in December 2001. He had an unlikely history for a top Al-Qaeda commander and strategist. He had spent 20 years at a desk job for Kuwait Airways. As the journalist Andy Worthington has painstakingly reported — and the court reiterated — he was also a humanitarian volunteer for Muslim refugees. Yet informants had described him as an Al-Qaeda supporter and confidant of Osama Bin Laden, and before he knew what was happening to him, he was whisked away to Guantanamo.

The informants’ accounts were riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted that “the only consistency with respect to [these] allegations is that they repeatedly change over time”. The one incriminating statement was given by another inmate after he had been subjected to sleep deprivation and coercion. So the only option left to prove that al-Rabiah had not been captured by mistake was his own confession.

The interrogators’ notes, forced into the open by the court, gave the game away. In the judge’s words, although “al-Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him”, they “never believed his confessions, based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports”. In fact, “the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that alRabiah should not have been detained”.

That CIA analyst, moreover, had told the justice department this was his judgment. Rather than withdraw the prosecution, however, the decision was made to get al-Rabiah to confess. He didn’t and wouldn’t. So he was subject to sleep deprivation and other unspecified “interrogation techniques” that led him to suffer “from serious depression, losing weight in a substantial way, and very stressed because of the constant moves, deprived of sleep and worried about the consequences for his children”.

Whatever the techniques applied to him, the outcome was a breakthrough for the US government. It resulted, in the judge’s words, in al-Rabiah’s “confession that he met with Osama Bin Laden, continued with his confession that he undertook a leadership role in Tora Bora, and repeated itself ... with respect to ‘evidence’ that the government has not even attempted to rely on as reliable or credible”.

The ruling also reveals that during the coercion, al-Rabiah began to make contradictory confessions; and when he tried to retract them, he was punished: “As a result, al-Rabiah’s interrogators began using abusive techniques that violated the Army Field Manual and the 1949 Geneva Conventions ... The first of these techniques included threats of rendition to places where al-Rabiah would either be tortured and/or would never be found.”

This scenario did not take place in communist China or Ahmadinejad’s Iran. It took place under the authority of the United States of America. One individual, we now know for sure, was tortured by interrogators who knew he was innocent but were determined to save face. Mercifully, the US is not China or Iran and an independent judiciary, after years of this man’s illegal imprisonment and torture, finally provided him with the writ of habeas corpus. Shockingly, although Barack Obama’s justice department knew the details of this case, it persisted with the Bush administration’s attempt to prosecute him. Last week, the Obama administration also backed a legal provision to withhold permanently all unreleased photographic evidence of torture in sites and prisons far away from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And some of us believed we were voting for change.

After writing about this case on my blog, a justice department trial lawyer wrote me an e-mail. In part it read: “The conclusion drawn by each of my colleagues — some of whom are liberal Democrats, some of whom are conservative, law-and-order Republicans — is, to a person, that the detention and interrogation programmes the United States implemented in the months and years following 9/11 is not only a complete abrogation and violation of international law and, in many cases, federal law — it is also fundamentally immoral.

“ We also agree that the al-Rabiah case is by far the most egregious yet to come to light. To repeat: yet to come to light. I can only guess that there are other, far worse cases.”

Well, we will at some point find out.

www.andrewsullivan.com

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