December 09, 2014

The U.S. Is Still Committed To Torture

The Senate Intelligence Committee torture report (pdf) is out. I do not expect anything really new in it. We already know that the CIA torturers as well as their political bosses were sadists.

The report is a whitewash in that it does not point out the legal and political culprits who ordered, justified and committed the torture acts. The report is also limited to the CIA and does not include the military which, as we know, also used torture and killed people in "interrogations". The U.S. is bound by law to prosecute all of them from top to bottom but it is unlikely to happen. Only one person from the CIA went to prison over the torture program. This not for committing torture but for revealing it.

Torture is useless, especially for interrogations, because people under torture will say anything to make the pain stop. But that very simple and often proven conclusion should to be easy to understand.

But the U.S. is still not committed to refrain from torture. The Army Field Manual 2 22.3. Appendix M is still in force and it allows "interrogation technics" which the UN’s Committee against Torture says (PDF) amount to torture. The White House is also still believing that using torture abroad is not covert by the UN Convention Against Torture and thereby permissible.

This, together with Appendix M, lets me assume that the U.S. is still torturing people abroad. Why else would it keep those legal holes open?

Posted by b on December 9, 2014 at 17:22 UTC | Permalink

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