It was not until February 2008 that Qahtani was first charged before a military commission, and the prosecution dropped the charges in May of that year. He was charged again in November 2008, but on January 14, 2009, Susan J. Crawford, a senior Pentagon official of the Bush administration, stated that she would not proceed with his prosecution. She said that Qahtani's "treatment met the legal definition of torture... The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive". As convening authority of the military commissions, Crawford was responsible for overseeing the Guantanamo military commissions. Her statement was the first time any top official of the Bush administration had said there was torture of detainees at Guantanamo.