Susan J. Crawford - Guantanamo Discussion

Guantanamo Discussion

When speaking at Bucknell University on April 27, 2007, Crawford said:

“Much of the media coverage and commentary has been negative, questioning our legal authority to hold detainees without a trial in U.S. Federal Courts,” Crawford said. “Under the law of war, the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are not held pending criminal charges. While detainees may be tried for violations of the law of war, there is no obligation to so charge them.”

During the same presentation, Crawford said:

"One of the biggest problems at Guantanamo is that the detainees gain too much weight because we feed them so well." In response to a question as to whether she endorses the practice of extraordinary rendition and the CIA's kidnapping of foreign citizens in other countries, Crawford said: "Well, I don't think we always have the right to kidnap foreign citizens."

On October 10, 2007, Morris D. Davis, the Chief Prosecutor for Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, resigned in protest, concluding that:

"... full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly."

Davis criticized Susan Crawford as a cause of the problems in the Military Commissions process, through her mixing of convening authority and prosecutor roles and her use of closed-door hearings, which he considered unnecessary. Morris called for removal of the political appointees: Susan Crawford and William J. Haynes, and return of control to uniformed career military authorities in order to restore openness and fairness to the Military Commissions process.

On August 9, 2008, William Glaberson wrote in the New York Times about Crawford's role in the recent Hamdan conviction:

There were unknowns. A Pentagon official, Susan J. Crawford, has broad power over the entire tribunal process, including naming the military officers eligible to hear the case. Her title, convening authority, has no civilian equivalent. Her decisions to grant or deny financing for items like the defense’s expert witness fees or defense lawyers’ transportation were not explained during the trial. She has never granted an interview to a reporter.

In an interview with Bob Woodward published in The Washington Post on January 14, 2009, Crawford responded to questions about why she had not referred the case of Mohammed al Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker" of the September 11th attacks, to trial:

"We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case .... 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 ."