CIA report: 'Torture is a crime and those

responsible must be brought to justice'

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other rights advocates say prosecutions
must follow Senates CIA torture report
Shocking cases in CIA report reveal an American torture program in disarray
Damning conclusion: report brands programme ineffective and brutal

The former US vicepresident Dick Cheney has defended the CIA torture programme as absolutely, totally
justified. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Wednesday 10 December 2014

The UN, human rights activists and legal experts have renewed calls for the Obama
administration to prosecute US officials responsible for the CIA torture programme
revealed in extensive detail following the release of a damning report by the Senate
intelligence committee.
The report, released on Tuesday, found the CIA misled the White House, the Justice
Department, Congress and the public over a torture programme that was both
ineffective and more brutal than the agency disclosed.
Todays release once again makes crystal clear that the US government used torture.
Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice,
Amnesty International USAs executive director, Steven W Hawkins, said in a
statement.
Under the UN convention against torture, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever
can be invoked to justify torture, and all those responsible for authorising or carrying

out torture or other ill-treatment must be fully investigated.

In Geneva, the United Nationss special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, said CIA officers and other US government officials should
be prosecuted.
The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within
the US government provides no excuse whatsoever, Emmerson said in a statement.

Amnesty International said

the findings showed exactly how free the US government felt to commit torture with
impunity. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Former Bush officials had been critical of the reports findings before they were made
public. Former vice-president Dick Cheney told the New York Times on Monday that
any attempt to portray the programme as a rogue operation was a bunch of hooey
and defended its use as absolutely, totally justified.
But Mary Ellen OConnell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre
Dame, told the Guardian that Cheneys comments were undermined by the contents of
the report.
By bringing out that the CIA lied to Congress, to the executive branch, to the Justice
Department, to the inspector general, to the courts and others, the report undermines
any chance for Republicans like former vice-president Cheney to defend the CIA,
OConnell said.
The United States is obligated under both the Geneva convention and the convention
against torture to investigate and prosecute the commission of torture.
Republican senator John McCain, tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war, was out of
step with some fellow Republicans in welcoming the report and endorsing its findings.
We gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer, he said in a
Senate speech. Too much.

President Obama has

cooled on commitments made during the 2008 election to pursue criminal
investigations. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
President Obama has cooled on commitments made during the 2008 election
campaign to pursue criminal investigations if it were proved that there were high
officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those
crimes with knowledge forefront.
A 2009 DoJ investigation into the use of torture, which was commissioned by the
former attorney general Michael Mukasey and headed by assistant US attorney John
Durham, concluded in August 2012 that no charges should be brought.
Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union,
described the Senate report as an exhaustive cataloguing not just of horrific details of
the interrogation and torture programme, but also of the mismanagement and a
chaotic CIA.
Anders added that the statute of limitations had not lapsed for some incidents included
in the report, particularly those that resulted in deaths.
The report documents the case of suspected militant Gul Rahman, who died from
hypothermia after a CIA officer was approved to use enhanced measures during his
interrogation and left him naked from the waist down and shackled to a wall in a cold
cell.
Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch, also called on
governments in other signatory states to the UN convention against torture to
prosecute officials should they enter their territory.
Other countries have all the information they need should they wish to exercise
universal jurisdiction and prosecute these officials should they appear in their borders,
Prasow said.
The director of Amnesty USAs security and human rights programme, Naureen Shah,

told the Guardian that among the most shocking disclosures in the report were
revelations that the US paid more than $180m (115m) to two contractor psychologists
to help establish the programme.
This is the kind of thing that goes beyond horrific, Shah said. It shows exactly how
free the US government felt to commit torture with impunity. Its brazen in its detail and
also in its abdication of legal responsibility the idea that you would outsource to
contractors the design of a programme that at base was about torture and ill
treatment.
The report reveals that use of torture in secret prisons run by the CIA across the world
was even more extreme than previously exposed, and included rectal rehydration
and rectal feeding, sleep deprivation lasting almost a week and threats to the families
of the detainees.
The names of other countries including Britain who cooperated with the US
programme by assisting the rendition of suspects were redacted from the published
report.
Asked about British involvement, David Cameron said the question that a
parliamentary inquiry was dealing with all those issues and that he had issued
guidance to British agents on how they have to handle these issues in future
Torture is wrong, torture is always wrong. Those of us who want to see a safer and
more secure world, who want to see extremism defeated, we wont succeed if we lose
our moral authority, if we lose the things that make or systems work and countries
successful, the prime minister said.
The Senate committee published nearly 500 pages of its investigation into the CIAs
detention and interrogation programme during the Bush administrations war on
terror. The full report is over 10 times longer, but the declassified section is dense with
detail and declassified communications between the officials involved.
Associated Press contributed to this report
Posted by Thavam