Torture. Again With The Torture.

From the AP:

A federal judge has ordered the release of a Kuwaiti man held at Guantanamo Bay and rebuked the U.S. government for relying on scant evidence, uncredible witnesses and coerced confessions to hold him for more than seven years.

In an opinion declassified Friday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said government attorneys presented a "surprisingly bare" record during four days of classified hearings last month to oppose Fouad Al Rabiah's request for release from the U.S. naval detention facility in Cuba. She said the aviation engineer is being held almost exclusively on confessions obtained through abusive techniques and that his own interrogators repeatedly concluded were not believable.

They also tortured him into a "confession." Take a look:

Kollar-Kotelly said the government withdrew its reliance on the witnesses to justify holding Al Rabiah, but interrogators at Guantanamo had used their allegations to draw a confession out of him. He initially denied the allegations, including that he ever met bin Laden, but he was subjected to "more aggressive and apparently unauthorized techniques" including sleep deprivation and threats of rendition that resulted in countless inconsistent confessions, the judge said.

"Al Rabiah's interrogators began using abusive techniques that violated the Army Field Manual and the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War," Kollar-Kotelly wrote. "The first of these techniques included threats of rendition to places where Al Rabiah would either be tortured and/or would never be found."

An innocent man was unlawfully detained based on the "information" gained by torture. When that information became untrustworthy, the man was tortured into giving his own confession. And all done in defense of a free society.

"My interrogators told me no one leaves Guantanamo innocent, and told me I would be sent home to Kuwait if I `admitted' some of the false things I had said in my interrogations," Al Rabiah said. "The interrogators also told me that I would never go home if I denied these things, because the United States government would never admit I had been wrongly held."

Torture is never morally acceptable. Torture is illegal. Prosecute the torture.

Failure to do so is immoral.