Donald Rumsfeld was directly linked to prisoner abuse for the first time yesterday, when it emerged he had been “personally involved” in a Guantánamo Bay interrogation found by military investigators to have been “degrading and abusive”.
Human Rights Watch last night called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate whether the defence secretary could be criminally liable for the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi al-Qaida suspect forced to wear women’s underwear, stand naked in front of a woman interrogator, and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash, in late 2002 and early 2003. The US rights group said it had obtained a copy of the interrogation log, which showed he was also subjected to sleep deprivation and forced to maintain “stress” positions; it concluded that the treatment “amounted to torture”.