US in violation of treaty agreements regarding torture
An important story in the Huffington Post by John Heilprin:
GENEVA — The United Nations’ torture investigator on Tuesday accused the United States of violating U.N. rules by refusing him unfettered access to the Army private accused of passing classified documents to WikiLeaks.
Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for torture, said he can’t do his job unless he has unmonitored access to detainees. He said the U.S. military’s insistence on monitoring conversations with Bradley Manning “violates long-standing rules” the U.N. follows for visits to inmates. . .
And Chris McGreal has more on US torture and the fight against it in the Guardian:
A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute George W Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the Obama administration fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that the US authorities were legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration’s legal team was part of the conspiracy in preparing opinions authorising abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.
Besides Bush, HRW names his vice-president, Dick Cheney, the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the ex-CIA director, George Tenet, as likely to be guilty of authorising torture and other crimes.
The group says that the investigation and prosecutions are required “if the US hopes to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and reaffirm the primacy of the rule of law”. . .
Do you think anything will be done? I don’t. I think the US has now fully embraced torture and war crimes and locking people up for years with no charges—and keeping them locked up even after it is clear that they are totally innocent of any wrongdoing—and spying on its own citizens and in general dismantling the institutions that once made the country great.
