Obama's Torture Hypocrisy

President
Barack Obama just announced that the U.S. government "must stand
against torture wherever it takes place," but it's clear that his
pledge does not apply to torture committed by officials from the Bush
administration.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment, Obama quietly released a statement
on Friday in which he said, "My administration is committed to taking
concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its
victims."

Obama's statement left out his decision
to "look forward, not backward" on the issue of Bush-era torture or how
he has discouraged any investigation of former President George W.
Bush, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials involved in
sanctioning and practicing torture, brutal tactics that human groups
claim killed at least 100 prisoners in U.S. custody

The 1984 Convention Against Torture was
approved by 145 nations, including the United States which signed it in
1988 under President Ronald Reagan. He hailed the treaty as "a
significant step" in preventing torture, "an abhorrent practice
unfortunately still prevalent in the world today."


The
Convention declares that: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,
whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political
instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a
justification of torture."

Moreover, the Convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot
defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from
superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they
are found. According to that provision, "each state party is required
either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to
extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, Reagan noted, "the core
provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international
cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on
so-called 'universal jurisdiction.'"

Evading the Treaty

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Bush
administration officials sought to bypass with legal memos, many
drafted by John Yoo of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Obama's declaration on Friday comes at a time when the international
community has become acutely aware of the policy of torture implemented
by the Bush administration – and of Obama's resistance to any type of
comprehensive investigation whether it be by a congressional committee,
a blue-ribbon commission or the Justice Department.

It's also clear that the United States is guilty of many of the
offenses that the U.S. government has in the past accused "rogue
regimes" of committing, such as hiding torture victims from human
rights monitors. For example, under the Bush administration, the
military routinely hid prisoners in U.S. custody from the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In a Jan. 2, 2004, memo drafted for military police and interrogators
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and signed by Col. Marc Warren, the top
legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was commander of U.S.
forces in Iraq, was entitled "New plan to restrict Red Cross access to
Abu Ghraib." The contents of that memo have never been released.

In 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that at the
request of then-CIA Director George Tenet, he authorized the U.S.
military in the fall of 2003 to hide an Iraqi prisoner from the ICRC
and other organizations that monitor the treatment of prisoners.

Rumsfeld told reporters at a June 17, 2004, press briefing that Tenet
sent him a letter asking the U.S. military to imprison the Iraqi who
was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish
terrorist group suspected of links to al-Qaeda. Tenet further told
Rumsfeld to be sure the detainee was kept off the prisoner rolls, which
he was for six months.

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