"These Are Crimes": New Calls to Prosecute Bush Administration as Senate Report Reveals Brutal CIA Torture

These are truly dark days. If I'd read such reports back when I was a
teenager, I would have assumed I was reading reports about crimes
committed by the Nazis or the Japs. A bit later I'd be certain it was
the torture camps of Joseph Stalin. I would have been outraged and
would have demanded that these criminals be brought to trial, given a
fair hearing and then hung.
But since it's our guys, the ones wearing the white hats and defending
peace, and promoting good will to men, well...what can we do but
remind ourselves that they are only doing criminal acts to protect us.
To which I say, Bullshit!

Carl Jarvis

On 12/12/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> "These Are Crimes": New Calls to Prosecute Bush Administration as Senate
> Report Reveals Brutal CIA Torture
> Thursday, 11 December 2014 11:31 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video
> Report
> Graphic new details of the post-9/11 U.S. torture program came to light
> Tuesday when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page summary
> of its investigation into the CIA with key parts redacted. The report
> concludes that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot
> despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons worldwide
> between 2002 and 2006, and details a list of torture methods used on
> prisoners, including waterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, and
> medically unnecessary "rectal feeding." The report also confirms the CIA
> ran
> black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a
> secret site on the Guantánamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields. So far
> no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged with a
> crime except the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007, he became the first
> person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly reveal its
> existence. He is now serving a 30-month sentence. We speak with Reed Brody,
> counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, who has written several
> reports on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including a 2011
> report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush
> administration officials.
> TRANSCRIPT:
> AMY GOODMAN: Graphic new details of the post-9/11 U.S. torture program came
> to light Tuesday when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page
> summary of its investigation into the CIA. The report concluded the
> intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing
> al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons worldwide between 2002 and
> 2006. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
> outlined the report's key findings.
> SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: First, the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques
> were not an effective way to gather intelligence information. Second, the
> CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate information about the
> operation
> of the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the Department of
> Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media and the American
> public. Third, CIA's management of the program was inadequate and deeply
> flawed. And fourth, the CIA program was far more brutal than people were
> led
> to believe.
> AMY GOODMAN: The Senate report details a list of torture methods used on
> prisoners--waterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, medically
> unnecessary "rectal feeding." In one case, a prisoner had his entire "lunch
> tray" of hummus, pasta and nuts puréed and administered by enema. Prisoners
> were threatened with buzzing power drills. Some captives were deprived of
> sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their
> heads.
> Speaking on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, Senator Feinstein discussed
> the
> death of Gul Rahman at a CIA black site north of Kabul, Afghanistan, known
> as the Salt Pit.
> SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: CIA placed a junior officer, with no relevant
> experience, in charge of the site. In November 2002, an otherwise healthy
> detainee, who was being held mostly nude and chained to a concrete floor,
> died at the facility from what is believed to have been hypothermia. In
> interviews conducted in 2003 by the CIA officer of the inspector general,
> CIA's leadership acknowledged that they had little or no awareness of
> operations at this specific CIA detention site.
> AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feinstein discussing the death of Gul Rahman. The
> Senate report also reveals Rahman was only detained due to mistaken
> identity.
> In another case, a detainee named Abu Hudhaifa was subjected to "ice water
> baths" and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released
> because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to
> be.
> According to the Senate report, the CIA ran black sites in Afghanistan and
> Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site at the Guantánamo
> Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.
> The Senate report released Tuesday is just the summary of a much longer
> investigation into CIA's torture practices. Key parts of the summary were
> redacted. The names of two psychologists who helped the CIA create the
> torture program are not included in the summary. The report does detail
> that
> the psychologists, whose names are James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,
> received
> an $81 million contract from the CIA.
> So far, no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged
> with a crime--with one exception: the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007,
> he became the first person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly
> reveal its existence. He is currently serving a 30-month sentence.
> For more on the Senate torture report, we're joined by Reed Brody, counsel
> and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He's written several reports for
> Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including
> a 2011 report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush
> administration officials.
> Reed, since I'm speaking to you from Lima, Peru, where the U.N. climate
> summit is happening, and you're in New York, and there's a satellite delay,
> if you could just lay out the most critical points that have come out in
> this, again, just the summary, not the actual thousands of pages that are
> still classified, but the remarkable revelations in this summary that has
> been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee?
> REED BRODY: Sure, Amy. As you say, the first thing that really jumps out is
> just the sheer pervasiveness of the brutality. I mean, even those of us who
> have been looking at this for the last 10 years, as one of my colleagues
> said, may be not surprised, but shocked.
> You know, you described the rectal feeding, the rectal hydration. You know,
> this was not just one prisoner, this was a number of prisoners. And they
> were used, according to the CIA documents, as a means of behavior control.
> I
> mean, this is, you know, an IV infusion placed up somebody's rectum, and
> the
> person is in a forward-facing position, their head lower than their torso,
> at which point you put in a rectal tube with an IV. The flow will regulate,
> sloshing up the large intestines. You put up the tube as large as you can,
> then you open the IV wide. No need to squeeze the bag, let gravity do the
> work. And this was not--you know, this is rape. This is the CIA discussing
> in
> emails and documents the methods they are using to rape detainees.
> A detainee who died in the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, who was partially nude
> and chained to a concrete floor, who died from suspected hypothermia; at
> least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, threats
> to the children of detainees, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a
> detainee; a detainee told that he would never be allowed to leave alive;
> detainees placed in ice water baths; people shackled in dark cells, called
> by--the CIA's own people referred to it as a "dungeon"--I mean, this is
> medieval stuff. And, you know, it really--it really--I have say, it's really
> shocking, even for me.
> As you mentioned, this was a dysfunctional program. The interrogation
> program was essentially outsourced to these two psychologists, who you
> mentioned. And neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator.
> They had no specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, no background in
> counterterrorism or any relevant linguistic or cultural information. And as
> you pointed out, they received $81 million. And these contractors made up
> 85
> percent--or their company that they created and other contractors made up 85
> percent of the workforce for these detainee operations.
> Now, at the same time that it was run amok, there was a culture--and this is
> important to understand--of just, you know, let them loose. On a number of
> occasions, there were complaints. There were--things went up to
> headquarters.
> And the word that came back was: "Look, we'd rather be safe than sorry."
> And
> in one case, no action was taken against a CIA officer for wrongful
> detention because, quote, "[t]he Director strongly believes that mistakes
> should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty. ... [T]he
> director
> believes the [scale tips] decisively in favor of accepting mistakes that
> over connect the dots [against those that] under connect them." Even in the
> case of the death from suspected hypothermia that we talked about,
> headquarters decided not to take action because they were "motivated to
> extract any and all operational information."
> You pointed out, I think, probably the key thing being discussed in
> Washington today is the conclusion that no actionable intelligence that
> could not have been garnered by other means were extracted through this
> program. And the committee went through 20 incidents in which the CIA
> claimed to have garnered actionable intelligence that was used to capture
> people or to foil plots. And in each of those 20 incidents, the committee
> found either that the intelligence already existed, that it wasn't used, or
> that the plot in fact didn't exist. And people particularly focus on the
> capture of Osama bin Laden and the identification of the courier who led
> the
> U.S. to Osama bin Laden. And the committee found that the vast majority of
> the intelligence about the Qaeda courier, quote, "was originally acquired
> from sources unrelated to the CIA's detention and interrogation program,
> and
> the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided
> prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to ... enhanced interrogation
> techniques."
> Another thing we see here constantly is the desire to evade the law. You
> referred to, and Dianne Feinstein, in what I found to be a remarkable
> speech
> on the Senate floor, referred to the lies. But there are a lot of little
> tidbits that we find in this report. For instance, you mentioned there was,
> in addition to the black sites in foreign countries, there was a black site
> at Guantánamo. But in 2004, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan ruling
> basically
> said the Constitution applies in Guantánamo. And at that point, the
> detainees who were in Guantánamo were shipped out of Guantánamo--and this is
> the CIA detainees, of course--and they were sent to Morocco. And actually,
> what's interesting tidbit in the report is that they were actually placed
> in
> a Moroccan jail, as opposed to the other countries where they were placed
> in
> CIA facilities. And the problem was that they heard--they were so close to
> the Moroccan prisoners that they could hear the Moroccan prisoners
> screaming.
> In the other cases, in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, the CIA
> detention centers were far away from--they were CIA detention centers. What
> is interesting in this report, too, about those centers is the kind of the
> diplomatic cost of having CIA detention centers in another country. Often,
> the ambassadors to those countries were not informed or were only informed
> after the deal was done. In order to basically buy the cooperation of these
> countries, the U.S. had to offer them wish lists of what they wanted. In
> one
> very interesting note in the report--and it shows the kind of the perverse
> effect of having a CIA detention center--the secretary of state in 2004
> ordered a U.S. ambassador in an unnamed country to démarche the country to
> ask that that country provide for its prisons full access to the
> International Committee of the Red Cross. But, of course, the problem was,
> at the same time, the U.S. had prisoners in that country who it was keeping
> secret and, obviously, not available to the Red Cross.
> Final and probably most important point is, I guess, what is not in this
> report. This report, you know, deals with one aspect of one part of the
> detainee mistreatment in the war on terror. It deals with the CIA prisoners
> held in black sites. It does not, for instance, deal with renditions by the
> CIA. So there's no mention in here of the CIA sending prisoners to places
> like Syria, under Bashar al-Assad, where people like Maher Arar, who has
> been on your show several times, was tortured. It does not talk about
> people
> being sent to Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence agencies, where
> they were tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Egypt. And
> it doesn't talk about what the Pentagon was doing. It doesn't talk about
> the
> programs approved by Donald Rumsfeld.
> And probably more importantly, by focusing everything on the CIA, it tends
> to kind of let off the hook all those people above who authorized these
> programs. So, we know, and from President Bush's own memoirs, that he
> authorized waterboarding. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John
> Ashcroft, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, these are all people who
> signed off on the authorization on these techniques, not to mention the
> lawyers, people like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who gave the legal
> authorization for this.
> Earlier, you had President Obama's remarks, in which he said that it was
> important that this report be made public so that, hopefully, we won't make
> these mistakes again. These aren't mistakes. These are crimes. And, you
> know, Dianne Feinstein, in her Senate remarks, referred to the U.N.
> Convention Against Torture, which says that torture can never be justified
> under any circumstances. Well, that convention says something else. It says
> that torture must be prosecuted, that when someone is alleged to have
> committed torture, the state concerned must refer that case to their
> competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
> What assurance do we have that this is not going to happen again? You know,
> it's not enough, again, to say, "Well, we tortured some folks, this was a
> bad policy choice, I'm going to put a stop to the torture." You know, it is
> not a policy choice, again. It is a crime. And there needs to be--if this is
> really going to be--if there are really going to be any deterrence for this
> not happening again, there needs to be prosecutions. And it's wonderful--you
> know, you've talked about Human Rights Watch's work around the world. Human
> rights organizations regularly, when countries commit torture, when
> individuals commit torture, we call on those countries to hold the abusers
> to account. And that has to be the same thing for the United States. We
> believe, as you mentioned--and we're not the only ones, the United Nations
> has said the same, Amnesty International has said the same--that there is a
> case to answer for senior U.S. leaders on charges of torture, for the
> things
> in this report and for the wider authorizations that they gave for torture
> and war crimes to be committed.
> AMY GOODMAN: Reed Brody, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
> Reed Brody is counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He's written
> several reports for Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war
> on terror. And we will link to the latest executive summary of the Senate
> report that has been released. And, of course, we will be bringing you more
> on this in the days to come.
> This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We're
> broadcasting from Lima, Peru, where the U.N. climate summit is taking
> place.
> When we come back, we'll be joined by one of the leading environmentalists
> in the world, Nnimmo Bassey of Nigeria. Stay with us.
> This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
> be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
> ________________________________________
> Show Comments
> Hide Comments
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> thread.</a>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> "These Are Crimes": New Calls to Prosecute Bush Administration as Senate
> Report Reveals Brutal CIA Torture
> Thursday, 11 December 2014 11:31 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video
> Report
> * font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.
> *
> * Graphic new details of the post-9/11 U.S. torture program came to
> light Tuesday when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page
> summary of its investigation into the CIA with key parts redacted. The
> report concludes that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single
> plot despite torturing al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons
> worldwide between 2002 and 2006, and details a list of torture methods used
> on prisoners, including waterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, and
> medically unnecessary "rectal feeding." The report also confirms the CIA
> ran
> black sites in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a
> secret site on the Guantánamo Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields. So far
> no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged with a
> crime except the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007, he became the first
> person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly reveal its
> existence. He is now serving a 30-month sentence. We speak with Reed Brody,
> counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, who has written several
> reports on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including a 2011
> report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush
> administration officials.
> TRANSCRIPT:
> AMY GOODMAN: Graphic new details of the post-9/11 U.S. torture program came
> to light Tuesday when the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page
> summary of its investigation into the CIA. The report concluded the
> intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing
> al-Qaeda and other captives in secret prisons worldwide between 2002 and
> 2006. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
> outlined the report's key findings.
> SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: First, the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques
> were not an effective way to gather intelligence information. Second, the
> CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate information about the
> operation
> of the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the Department of
> Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media and the American
> public. Third, CIA's management of the program was inadequate and deeply
> flawed. And fourth, the CIA program was far more brutal than people were
> led
> to believe.
> AMY GOODMAN: The Senate report details a list of torture methods used on
> prisoners--waterboarding, sexual threats with broomsticks, medically
> unnecessary "rectal feeding." In one case, a prisoner had his entire "lunch
> tray" of hummus, pasta and nuts puréed and administered by enema. Prisoners
> were threatened with buzzing power drills. Some captives were deprived of
> sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their
> heads.
> Speaking on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, Senator Feinstein discussed
> the
> death of Gul Rahman at a CIA black site north of Kabul, Afghanistan, known
> as the Salt Pit.
> SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: CIA placed a junior officer, with no relevant
> experience, in charge of the site. In November 2002, an otherwise healthy
> detainee, who was being held mostly nude and chained to a concrete floor,
> died at the facility from what is believed to have been hypothermia. In
> interviews conducted in 2003 by the CIA officer of the inspector general,
> CIA's leadership acknowledged that they had little or no awareness of
> operations at this specific CIA detention site.
> AMY GOODMAN: Senator Feinstein discussing the death of Gul Rahman. The
> Senate report also reveals Rahman was only detained due to mistaken
> identity.
> In another case, a detainee named Abu Hudhaifa was subjected to "ice water
> baths" and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released
> because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to
> be.
> According to the Senate report, the CIA ran black sites in Afghanistan and
> Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site at the Guantánamo
> Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.
> The Senate report released Tuesday is just the summary of a much longer
> investigation into CIA's torture practices. Key parts of the summary were
> redacted. The names of two psychologists who helped the CIA create the
> torture program are not included in the summary. The report does detail
> that
> the psychologists, whose names are James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,
> received
> an $81 million contract from the CIA.
> So far, no one involved in the CIA interrogation program has been charged
> with a crime--with one exception: the whistleblower John Kiriakou. In 2007,
> he became the first person with direct knowledge of the program to publicly
> reveal its existence. He is currently serving a 30-month sentence.
> For more on the Senate torture report, we're joined by Reed Brody, counsel
> and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He's written several reports for
> Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war on terror, including
> a 2011 report which called for a criminal investigation of senior Bush
> administration officials.
> Reed, since I'm speaking to you from Lima, Peru, where the U.N. climate
> summit is happening, and you're in New York, and there's a satellite delay,
> if you could just lay out the most critical points that have come out in
> this, again, just the summary, not the actual thousands of pages that are
> still classified, but the remarkable revelations in this summary that has
> been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee?
> REED BRODY: Sure, Amy. As you say, the first thing that really jumps out is
> just the sheer pervasiveness of the brutality. I mean, even those of us who
> have been looking at this for the last 10 years, as one of my colleagues
> said, may be not surprised, but shocked.
> You know, you described the rectal feeding, the rectal hydration. You know,
> this was not just one prisoner, this was a number of prisoners. And they
> were used, according to the CIA documents, as a means of behavior control.
> I
> mean, this is, you know, an IV infusion placed up somebody's rectum, and
> the
> person is in a forward-facing position, their head lower than their torso,
> at which point you put in a rectal tube with an IV. The flow will regulate,
> sloshing up the large intestines. You put up the tube as large as you can,
> then you open the IV wide. No need to squeeze the bag, let gravity do the
> work. And this was not--you know, this is rape. This is the CIA discussing
> in
> emails and documents the methods they are using to rape detainees.
> A detainee who died in the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, who was partially nude
> and chained to a concrete floor, who died from suspected hypothermia; at
> least three detainees were threatened with harm to their families, threats
> to the children of detainees, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a
> detainee; a detainee told that he would never be allowed to leave alive;
> detainees placed in ice water baths; people shackled in dark cells, called
> by--the CIA's own people referred to it as a "dungeon"--I mean, this is
> medieval stuff. And, you know, it really--it really--I have say, it's really
> shocking, even for me.
> As you mentioned, this was a dysfunctional program. The interrogation
> program was essentially outsourced to these two psychologists, who you
> mentioned. And neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator.
> They had no specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, no background in
> counterterrorism or any relevant linguistic or cultural information. And as
> you pointed out, they received $81 million. And these contractors made up
> 85
> percent--or their company that they created and other contractors made up 85
> percent of the workforce for these detainee operations.
> Now, at the same time that it was run amok, there was a culture--and this is
> important to understand--of just, you know, let them loose. On a number of
> occasions, there were complaints. There were--things went up to
> headquarters.
> And the word that came back was: "Look, we'd rather be safe than sorry."
> And
> in one case, no action was taken against a CIA officer for wrongful
> detention because, quote, "[t]he Director strongly believes that mistakes
> should be expected in a business filled with uncertainty. ... [T]he
> director
> believes the [scale tips] decisively in favor of accepting mistakes that
> over connect the dots [against those that] under connect them." Even in the
> case of the death from suspected hypothermia that we talked about,
> headquarters decided not to take action because they were "motivated to
> extract any and all operational information."
> You pointed out, I think, probably the key thing being discussed in
> Washington today is the conclusion that no actionable intelligence that
> could not have been garnered by other means were extracted through this
> program. And the committee went through 20 incidents in which the CIA
> claimed to have garnered actionable intelligence that was used to capture
> people or to foil plots. And in each of those 20 incidents, the committee
> found either that the intelligence already existed, that it wasn't used, or
> that the plot in fact didn't exist. And people particularly focus on the
> capture of Osama bin Laden and the identification of the courier who led
> the
> U.S. to Osama bin Laden. And the committee found that the vast majority of
> the intelligence about the Qaeda courier, quote, "was originally acquired
> from sources unrelated to the CIA's detention and interrogation program,
> and
> the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided
> prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to ... enhanced interrogation
> techniques."
> Another thing we see here constantly is the desire to evade the law. You
> referred to, and Dianne Feinstein, in what I found to be a remarkable
> speech
> on the Senate floor, referred to the lies. But there are a lot of little
> tidbits that we find in this report. For instance, you mentioned there was,
> in addition to the black sites in foreign countries, there was a black site
> at Guantánamo. But in 2004, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan ruling
> basically
> said the Constitution applies in Guantánamo. And at that point, the
> detainees who were in Guantánamo were shipped out of Guantánamo--and this is
> the CIA detainees, of course--and they were sent to Morocco. And actually,
> what's interesting tidbit in the report is that they were actually placed
> in
> a Moroccan jail, as opposed to the other countries where they were placed
> in
> CIA facilities. And the problem was that they heard--they were so close to
> the Moroccan prisoners that they could hear the Moroccan prisoners
> screaming.
> In the other cases, in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, the CIA
> detention centers were far away from--they were CIA detention centers. What
> is interesting in this report, too, about those centers is the kind of the
> diplomatic cost of having CIA detention centers in another country. Often,
> the ambassadors to those countries were not informed or were only informed
> after the deal was done. In order to basically buy the cooperation of these
> countries, the U.S. had to offer them wish lists of what they wanted. In
> one
> very interesting note in the report--and it shows the kind of the perverse
> effect of having a CIA detention center--the secretary of state in 2004
> ordered a U.S. ambassador in an unnamed country to démarche the country to
> ask that that country provide for its prisons full access to the
> International Committee of the Red Cross. But, of course, the problem was,
> at the same time, the U.S. had prisoners in that country who it was keeping
> secret and, obviously, not available to the Red Cross.
> Final and probably most important point is, I guess, what is not in this
> report. This report, you know, deals with one aspect of one part of the
> detainee mistreatment in the war on terror. It deals with the CIA prisoners
> held in black sites. It does not, for instance, deal with renditions by the
> CIA. So there's no mention in here of the CIA sending prisoners to places
> like Syria, under Bashar al-Assad, where people like Maher Arar, who has
> been on your show several times, was tortured. It does not talk about
> people
> being sent to Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence agencies, where
> they were tortured. It does not talk about people being sent to Egypt. And
> it doesn't talk about what the Pentagon was doing. It doesn't talk about
> the
> programs approved by Donald Rumsfeld.
> And probably more importantly, by focusing everything on the CIA, it tends
> to kind of let off the hook all those people above who authorized these
> programs. So, we know, and from President Bush's own memoirs, that he
> authorized waterboarding. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John
> Ashcroft, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, these are all people who
> signed off on the authorization on these techniques, not to mention the
> lawyers, people like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who gave the legal
> authorization for this.
> Earlier, you had President Obama's remarks, in which he said that it was
> important that this report be made public so that, hopefully, we won't make
> these mistakes again. These aren't mistakes. These are crimes. And, you
> know, Dianne Feinstein, in her Senate remarks, referred to the U.N.
> Convention Against Torture, which says that torture can never be justified
> under any circumstances. Well, that convention says something else. It says
> that torture must be prosecuted, that when someone is alleged to have
> committed torture, the state concerned must refer that case to their
> competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
> What assurance do we have that this is not going to happen again? You know,
> it's not enough, again, to say, "Well, we tortured some folks, this was a
> bad policy choice, I'm going to put a stop to the torture." You know, it is
> not a policy choice, again. It is a crime. And there needs to be--if this is
> really going to be--if there are really going to be any deterrence for this
> not happening again, there needs to be prosecutions. And it's wonderful--you
> know, you've talked about Human Rights Watch's work around the world. Human
> rights organizations regularly, when countries commit torture, when
> individuals commit torture, we call on those countries to hold the abusers
> to account. And that has to be the same thing for the United States. We
> believe, as you mentioned--and we're not the only ones, the United Nations
> has said the same, Amnesty International has said the same--that there is a
> case to answer for senior U.S. leaders on charges of torture, for the
> things
> in this report and for the wider authorizations that they gave for torture
> and war crimes to be committed.
> AMY GOODMAN: Reed Brody, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
> Reed Brody is counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He's written
> several reports for Human Rights Watch on prisoner mistreatment in the war
> on terror. And we will link to the latest executive summary of the Senate
> report that has been released. And, of course, we will be bringing you more
> on this in the days to come.
> This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We're
> broadcasting from Lima, Peru, where the U.N. climate summit is taking
> place.
> When we come back, we'll be joined by one of the leading environmentalists
> in the world, Nnimmo Bassey of Nigeria. Stay with us.
> This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
> be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
>
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