Asim Qureshi [Senior Researcher, Cageprisoners]: "One of the key components of the Bush administration's understanding of torture is the extreme technicality with which they approach the topic. When the teenager Mohammed Jawad was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, his abuse at the hands of his captors was by Afghans and not US personnel. It is this fact that provides the Bush administration with the technicality they need in order to attempt to bypass the rules against torture.

This form of legal manipulation in many ways is symptomatic of the US led War on Terror. The humanity of the strongest norms of human rights and international law have been reduced to a difference of legal opinion in a process where the US has sought to pave its own will into international legal order.

What is forgotten in the process of legalizing torture, arbitrary detention and rendition, is that the norms that were established to protect the innocent and guilty were put into place to directly deal with the world in which we live in today. The Geneva Conventions and Convention Against Torture find their most relevance in today's world, a world where the lines of humanity are being blurred by all.

Using technicalities to circumvent the rule against torture only serves one purpose, and that is to deny the essence of the rule and its importance to the world and future generations. In the case of Jawad the ruling of judge Stephen Henley that Jawad's confessions were obtained in circumstances that amount to torture and duress should be commended and ordered to stand, for such judgments truly recognize the ethics of the law."