Human Rights Watch demands U.S. criminal probe of CIA torture

[IDemo]

Source: Reuters

Human Rights Watch called on the Obama administration on Tuesday to investigate 21 former U.S. officials, including former President George W. Bush, for potential criminal misconduct for their roles in the CIA's torture of terrorism suspects in detention.

The other officials include former Vice President Dick Cheney, former CIA Director George Tenet, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Human Rights Watch argued that details of the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation program that were made public by a U.S. Senate committee in December 2014 provided enough evidence for the Obama administration to open an inquiry.

"It’s been a year since the Senate torture report, and still the Obama administration has not opened new criminal investigations into CIA torture," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "Without criminal investigations, which would remove torture as a policy option, Obama’s legacy will forever be poisoned."



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/12/01/us-cia-torture-idUSKBN0TK4UX20151201

[DetlefK]

1. HA! Good luck with that.

Obama didn't do it in the beginning because that would have been anything but bipartisan.
(Remember Obama's first cabinet? He had Democrats and Republicans and the Republicans were pissed anyways because they didn't get to keep governing as if there hadn't been an election they had just lost.)

And now, if Obama prosecutes someone from the Bush-administration that will be the ultimate proof that he's a muslim, atheist, communist, socialist, america-hating, satanic, lizard-people, black racist, lily-hearted brutal tyrant whose whole presidency was planned decades ago when he was born in Kenya.

[stupidicus]

2. yep, we don't see rightwingnuts whining about his exercizing his prosecutorial discretion

in this case, now do we...

[OnyxCollie]

3. Ah, but we have our own Defenders of the Status Quo shouting, "Prosecutorial discretion!",

as if that somehow eliminated the obligation to prosecute under a signed and ratified international treaty.

[stupidicus]

4. making themselves aiders and abetters imo

inaction of this front is the single biggest failure on BHO's part imo, and history will likely judge him harshly as a result -- assuming that the good guys write the histry books that is.

[cstanleytech]

5. Not sure why this has been posted to LBN because hasnt Human Rights Watch

repeatedly asked for atleast the last 2 years or more that there be investigations and prosecutions against the CIA and others who ordered torture to be used?

[IDemo]

6. Don't know when the last request was made by them

This certainly qualifies as LBN in my view as the request was made today, and is made at least in part because calls from some Republican Presidential candidates for the revival of the CIA interrogation techniques made the need for a renewed inquiry that much more important.

"Until the inherent criminality of these acts is made clear," she said, "there is a danger that future administrations will use the same tactics again."

[cstanleytech]

18. Well they made similar request in 2014

https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/12/22/us-investigate-prosecute-cia-torture

US: Investigate, Prosecute CIA Torture

(New York) – Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union have written to US Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to order a criminal investigation into torture and other serious abuses relating to the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program.

[mjvpi]

7. With the currant administrations drone policies?

At 58, I'm still a proud American, but the things my country has done in my lifetime. The CIA under Dulles. Vietnam. Reagan and South American counties. Bush one and two. God bless Human Rights Watch and many other groups for keeping this in our face! And I'm an Atheist!

Stop waving the flag and start living up to it.

[FreedomRain]

12. 'Stop waving the flag and start living up to it.'

Googled the quote to see if this was a thing, and its not on the first 2 pages. (That first link does go to a very weird place tho ) I
love this line so much, I am going to put it everywhere, ok?

[mjvpi]

16. I stole it!

Please credit Shano (spelling?) from the Thom Hartman program. Brilliant line that should be spread all over.

[FreedomRain]

17. will do

and will check him out, you are not the first to bring that name to my attention

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. 1st reaction: Find out if HRW is "American"....

If so: Shut them down.

If not: Ignore them.

[Martin Eden]

9. Torture is a plank in Donald Trump's campaign

Just being exposed to his constant demagoguery in this presidential campaign is torture enough!

[FairWinds]

10. People keep getting this wrong . .

most of the torture was done by the US military, not the CIA.

Abu Ghraib, for example, had nothing to do with the CIA.

And torture is not only outlawed by international treaty, but by
US law as well.

Failing to prosecute it makes a cruel mockery of the "rule of law."

Veterans For Peace

[IDemo]

11. A Detainee Describes More C.I.A. Torture

Soon after his capture, Mr. Khan said, interrogators waterboarded him twice, a contention that contradicts the Central Intelligence Agency’s claim that it had already named all detainees who were subjected to that practice. (The C.I.A. has denied that Mr. Khan was waterboarded.) As he was moved among a series of C.I.A.-operated “black sites” over the following months, Mr. Khan told his lawyers, the torture continued. He was beaten repeatedly. He was hung naked from a wooden beam for three days, shackled and starved. He was taken down once during that time to be submerged in an ice bath. Interrogators pushed his head under the water until he thought he would drown. He received what he called “violent enemas,” and was anally assaulted in a process the interrogators called “rectal feeding.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/06/opinion/a-detainee-describes-more-cia-torture.html

7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report

1. The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed.

The report describes extensive waterboarding as a “series of near drownings” and suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three prisoners the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The report also describes detainees being subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week, medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” and death threats. Conditions at one prison, described by a clandestine officer as a “dungeon,” were blamed for the death of a detainee, and the harsh techniques were described as leading to “psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.”

More --- http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-key-points.html

[Judi Lynn]

13. Thanks for posting this information. Where was HRW during Bush's occupation?

The people involved in committing these atrocities should already be lodged in the bowels of a dark, dank prison.

[IDemo]

14. Apr 2005 - Getting Away with Torture? (PDF)

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/us0405.pdf

Executive Summary

It has now been one year since the appearance of the first pictures of U.S. soldiers humiliating
and torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Shortly after the photos came out,
President George W. Bush vowed that the “wrongdoers will be brought to justice.”


In the intervening months, it has become clear that torture and abuse have taken place not solely
at Abu Ghraib but rather in dozens of U.S. detention facilities worldwide, that in many cases the
abuse resulted in death or severe trauma, and that a good number of the victims were civilians
with no connection to al-Qaeda or terrorism. There is also evidence of abuse at U.S.-controlled
“secret locations” abroad and of U.S. authorities sending suspects to third-country dungeons
around the world where torture was likely to occur.


To date, however, the only wrongdoers being brought to justice are those at the bottom of the
chain-of-command. The evidence demands more. Yet a wall of impunity surrounds the
architects of the policies responsible for the larger pattern of abuses.


As this report shows, evidence is mounting that high-ranking U.S. civilian and military leaders —
including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet,
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Major
General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
— made decisions and issued policies that facilitated serious and widespread violations of the
law. The circumstances strongly suggest that they either knew or should have known that such
violations took place as a result of their actions. There is also mounting data that, when
presented with evidence that abuse was in fact taking place, they failed to act to stem the abuse.

[IDemo]

15. From 2002:

The United States and the International Criminal Court


The United States of America was one of only 7 nations (joining China, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Qatar and Israel) to vote against the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998.

The Bush administration's hostility to the ICC has increased dramatically in 2002. The crux of the U.S. concern relates to the prospect that the ICC may exercise its jurisdiction to conduct politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. military and political officials and personnel. The U.S. opposition to the ICC is in stark contrast to the strong support for the Court by most of America's closest allies.

In an unprecedented diplomatic maneuver on 6 May, the Bush administration effectively withdrew the U.S. signature on the treaty. At the time, the Ambassador-at-large for War Crimes Issues Pierre-Richard Prosper stated that the administration was "not going to war" with the Court. This has proved false; the renunciation of the treaty has paved the way for a comprehensive U.S. campaign to undermine the ICC.

More -- https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/icc/us.htm