USA Africa Dialogue Series - CIA Torture...UN rapporteur calls for criminal prosecutions of US officials

10 December 2014 BBC News
CIA interrogations report sparks prosecution calls
Speaking on Telemundo, President Obama said some of the techniques used amounted to torture
The UN and human rights groups have called for the prosecution of US officials involved in what a Senate report <http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf> called the "brutal" CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.
A top UN human rights envoy said there had been a "clear policy orchestrated at a high level".
The CIA<https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/CIAs_June2013_Response_to_the_SSCI_Study_on_the_Former_Detention_and_Interrogation_Program.pdf> has defended its actions in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US, saying they saved lives.
President Barack Obama said it was now time to move on.
Moazzam Begg said that hostage beheadings were a "direct result" of torture
'Criminal charges'
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emmerson said that senior officials from the administration of George W Bush who planned and sanctioned crimes must be prosecuted, as well as CIA and US government officials responsible for torture such as waterboarding.
"As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice," Mr Emmerson said in a statement made from Geneva<http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15397&LangID=E>.
"The US attorney general is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible."
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said that the CIA's actions were criminal<http://www.hrw.org/node/131091> "and can never be justified".
"Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a 'policy option' for future presidents," he said.
Key findings:

*
None of 20 cases of counterterrorism "successes" attributed to the techniques led to unique or otherwise unavailable intelligence
*
The CIA misled politicians and public
*
At least 26 of 119 known detainees in custody during the life of the programme were wrongfully held, and many held for months longer than they should have been
*
Methods included sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, often standing or in painful positions
*
Saudi al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah was kept confined in a coffin-sized box for hours on end
*
Waterboarding and "rectal hydration" were physically harmful to prisoners, causing convulsions and vomiting
'A scandal'
The American Civil Liberties Union (Aclu) argued that the attorney general should appoint a special prosecutor to conduct "an independent and complete investigation of Bush administration officials who created, approved, carried out and covered up the torture programme".

There have been reservations in the US about the use of torture against terror suspects for many years
"The crime of torture has no statute of limitations when torture risks or results in serious injury or death, and the US government has the obligation under international law to investigate any credible evidence that torture has been committed," an Aclu statement said.<https://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/uss-story-torture-doesnt-have-end-impunity>
"If there's sufficient evidence of criminal conduct... The offenders should be prosecuted. In our system, no one should be above the law, yet only a handful of mainly low-level personnel have been criminally prosecuted for abuse. That is a scandal."
Analysis: BBC North America editor Jon Sopel
There is no doubt this has been a deeply uncomfortable day for the CIA, with the activities of a normally secret organisation laid bare. It finds itself caught in a political dogfight between Democrats and Republicans and in a battle between past and present.
There will be millions of Americans scratching their heads, saying this was a difficult time and that the CIA was dealing with some very bad people and it did what it had to do.
But Barack Obama has a different agenda. He recognises America's reputation around the world was damaged, and that is something he is seeking to put right by saying that bad things happened and they should not have done.
The report's 20 key findings<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30401025>
The unlikely interrogators<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30405918>
Who were the detainees?<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30402111>

'In the past'
President Obama said on Tuesday that he hoped that the publication of the report would not lead to a re-fight of old arguments.
"I hope that [the] report can help us leave these techniques where they belong - in the past," he said.
Mr Obama banned harsh interrogation techniques after taking office in 2009.
Correspondents say that the chances of prosecuting members of the Bush administration are unlikely, not least because the Department of Justice has said that it has already pursued two investigations into mistreatment of detainees since 2000 and concluded that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain a conviction.
The report accuses US intelligence agencies of using "extraordinary rendition" to send terror suspects for questioning in countries where they had no legal protection or rights under American law
John McCain said that the abuse of prisoners produced more bad than good intelligence
Influential Republican Senator John McCain argued that torture "rarely yields credible information" and that even in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden the most important lead came from "conventional interrogation methods".
"What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow," he said in a statement.<http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1a15e343-66b0-473f-b0c1-a58f984db996>
The report says that the CIA carried out "brutal" interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the US.
The summary of the report, compiled by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the CIA had misled Americans about what it was doing.
The information the CIA collected this way failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said.
Some Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee released a minority report<http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy3.pdf>, accusing the Senate report of having a "flawed analytical methodology", "inadequate objectivity" and "political considerations".
The CIA has argued that the interrogations had helped save lives.
"The intelligence gained from the programme was critical to our understanding of al-Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day," director John Brennan said.
However, the CIA also acknowledged mistakes in the programme.
The CIA programme - known internally as Rendition, Detention and Interrogation - took place from 2002-07, during the presidency of Mr Bush.
Introducing the report to the Senate, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein described the CIA's actions as a "stain on US history".
"The release of this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it's wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes," she said.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron said the issue had been "dealt with from a British perspective"
Former CIA lawyer John Rizzo on "enhanced interrogation": "I don't think I had any other choice"
He added: "After 9/11 there were things that happened that were wrong - and we should be clear about the fact they were wrong."
He said that the UK had conducted the Gibson Inquiry<http://www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk/>, which examined whether the UK was implicated in the rendition and ill-treatment of terror suspects held by other countries.
The inquiry had "produced a series of questions that the intelligence and security community will look at," he said, adding: "I'm satisfied that our system is dealing with all of these issues."
The Senate committee's report runs to more than 6,000 pages, but it remains classified and only a 525-page summary<http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf> has been released.
The CIA's defence of its tactics was supported by former Vice President Dick Cheney who told The New York Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/world/dismissing-senate-report-cheney-defends-cia-interrogations.html?_r=0> the interrogations were "absolutely, totally justified".
"When we had that programme in place, we kept the country safe from any more mass casualty attacks, which was our objective," he said.
Mr Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009.
US intelligence agencies were accused of using "extraordinary rendition" to send terror suspects for questioning in countries where they had no legal protection or rights under American law. Some of the suspects claimed they had been tortured in countries such as Syria and Egypt.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stop believing the lies: America tortured more than 'some folks' – and covered it up
Trevor Timm<http://www.theguardian.com/profile/trevor-timm>, The Guardian
CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn't work, but why aren't the architects of torture in jail?
Rectal rehydration and waterboarding: how the CIA tortured its detainees<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-methods-waterboarding-sleep-deprivation>
Tuesday 9 December 2014
It wasn't that bad, we've been told, over and over again, for more than a decade. "We only waterboarded three people" goes the line American officials have been force-feeding the world for years. "We tortured some folks," Barack Obama admitted recently, still downplaying war crimes committed in America's name. But we now know those statements do not even begin to do justice to the horrific activities carried out by the CIA for years<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-methods-waterboarding-sleep-deprivation> – atrocities that now have been exposed by the US Senate's historic report on the CIA's torture program, finally released<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released-senate> on Tuesday after years of delay<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/torture-obama-cover-up-cia>.
There are stories in the CIA torture report<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2014/dec/09/-sp-torture-report-cia-senate-intelligence-committee> of "rectal rehydration as a means of behavior control"<https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/542360972036292608>, threats to murder and "threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee" – or cut a mother's throat<https://twitter.com/elisefoley/status/542352843752357889>. There are details about detainees with broken bones forced to stand for days on end, detainees blindfolded, dragged down hallways while they were beaten. There were even torture sessions that ended in death. The list goes on and on, and on and on<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/senate-key-findings-on-cia-torture>.
But beyond all the the depravity, perhaps the most shocking part of this exposed history is the action of US officials who knew these horrors were unfolding – and covered them up.
For years, as the 480-page executive summary of the report documents in meticulous detail, these officials lied to the Senate, the Justice Department, the White House, to the American public and to the world. They prevented CIA officers involved from being disciplined. They investigated and marginalized<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/12intel.html?pagewanted=all> those who were investigating them. They happily leaked classified information to journalists<https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/542362036005765120> – much of it false – without worry of consequence.
For the past few days, we have seen many of the same resentful<https://twitter.com/tnyCloseRead/status/542369363966574592> politicians<https://twitter.com/nprnews/status/542376129420877824> and former CIA leaders<https://twitter.com/CBSNLive/status/542375673420337153> in charge of the torture-denial regime being handed virtual royalty status by the American media to respond to pre-emptively respond to the report without much of any pushback. Dick Cheney basically got to write his own interview<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/world/dismissing-senate-report-cheney-defends-cia-interrogations.html> in the New York Times, while Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director in charge of lying to the Senate for years, was handed softball after softball by Bob Schieffer of CBS News to make his case. It is borderline propaganda.
As Schieffer innocently asked Hayden<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-cia-chief-michael-hayden-raises-alarm-about-forthcoming-senate-torture-report/> a few days ago: "Do you know of anybody from the CIA, in your view, who lied to Congress about what was going on there?" Hayden's name appears in the torture report more than 200 times, and most of the references document the various times he knowingly misled one government body or another. As media organizations continue turning to Hayden for comment time and again, they should understand the Senate report indicates that basically every time he's opened his mouth about "enhanced interrogation" over the past decade, he's has been lying.
Even if it's not Hayden, you can bet over the next few days that in almost every newspaper article and on every cable-news network, there will be a former intelligence official – trying to defend the indefensible, refusing "to use the word 'torture'"<https://twitter.com/mmurraypolitics/status/542367950574190592>. Already, this op-ed published at the Wall Street Journal<http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives-1418142644>, where all the complicit former CIA directors in an attempt muddy the waters, gives you a good idea of what they'll be saying.
The torture defenders from the CIA and the Bush administration probably won't even make a serious attempt to say they didn't torture anyone – just that it was effective, that there were "serious mistakes"<https://twitter.com/marcambinder/status/542363959794225152>, but that "countless lives have been saved and our Homeland is more secure"<https://twitter.com/RosieGray/status/542351274612908033> – with a capital H.
This highlights the mistake of the Senate committee, in a way. Instead of focusing on the illegal nature of the torture, Senator Dianne Feinstein's investigators worked to document torture's ineffectiveness. The debate, now, is whether torture worked. It clearly didn't. But the debate should be: Why the hell aren't these torturous liars in jail<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released-senate#block-5487329de4b0251e38c7f564>?
Worse still, the CIA has still largely succeeded in stripping the landmark report of anything that could lead to accountability. The agents who were not only protected from discipline for their actions but were promoted now have their names completely redacted. So, too, are the names of the dozens of countries that helped the CIA<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/cia> carry out its torture regime. That includes many of the world's worst dictators – the very men America now claims to hate, including Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
But make no mistake: there's still an extraordinary amount to take away from this report. If there is one tragic story, out of the many<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/the-faces-of-cia-detainees-subjected-to-torture>, that is emblematic of the CIA program, as its supporters defend it in the days, it's that of Gul Ruhman. It may be two stories – it's hard to know, so much has been redacted and the atrocities are so countless – but at least one Gul Ruhman we know was tortured at the notorious CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, chained to the floor and frozen to death. The CIA's inspector general referred this person's case to CIA leadership for discipline, but was overruled. Four months after the incident, the officer who gave the order that led to Rahman's death was recommended for a $2,500 "cash reward" for his "consistently superior work"<https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/542395242180132864>.
Footnote 32 explains why a dead prisoner ended up in CIA custody in the first place: "Gul Ruhman, another case of mistaken identity."
a repeat. The moral and practical authority of the democratic system around the world depends in no small part on them succeeding.

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.