Opinion:

US ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency': Obama hides prisoner torture report

by Daya Gamage

The release of the 6,000-page bipartisan Congressional report drafted by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on post-9/11 terrorist torture, rendition and indefinite incarceration of terrorist suspects under the previous Bush administration will be withheld as the Obama administration has refused to share its finding with the American people in general and the international community in particular. So much for America's advocacy of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ that it seeks from other nations that have undergone brutal terrorism on their soil! Bringing the violators to justice is another issue altogether.

President Barack Obama is currently blocking the release of a comprehensive Senate report on the use of torture by the George W. Bush administration Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that is said to conclude that torture was not an effective or reliable method of interrogation and that the agency repeatedly misled the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress about its interrogation efforts.

Reports reaching the Asian Tribune indicate that the Senate torture probe entailed about six years of work and the review of six million pages of documents. In December 2012, the committee voted out the report on a mostly party line vote. Since that time, the report has been stuck in limbo at the CIA, with Director John Brennan refusing to state when his review will be complete, and reports indicating that the agency intends to write a rebuttal and oppose the public release of the report.

The CIA ‘review’ was subsequently given, but the main report is still classified. It is said that the release of the report will not compromise national security, but may expose the United States’ disregard for universally accepted human rights practices and violation of the International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

The contents of the report, if released, may embarrass the United States which takes the lead in assuming the role of the ‘judge’ of global human rights practices in producing the State Department annual report of Global Practices of Human Rights and America's constant advocacy of good governance, rule of law and safeguarding human rights to other nations.

Its contents include details on each prisoner in CIA custody, the conditions of their confinement, whether they were tortured, the intelligence they provided, and the degree to which the CIA lied about its behaviour to overseers. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared it one of the most significant oversight efforts in American history, noting that it contains “startling details” and raises “critical questions”.

Critical findings

The US Senate committee’s highly critical findings - including information on the Bush administration’s secret “black site” prisons and interrogation techniques - have been consistently disputed by the CIA and the White House.

The CIA has met continuously with the committee since members approved its report in December 2012. Agency officials have publicly charged that some of the committee report’s findings are inaccurate and have asked that it not be released. The Obama administration has allowed the report to be holed in the CIA and has not taken steps to make it available to the American public and to the international community, contrary to the rhetoric by American administrations and agencies such as the State Department on openness, transparency, accountability and maintaining high standards of international human rights practices. The New York Times, under the caption ‘Release the Torture Report’ in an editorial opinion, stated on Friday, December 20, “A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is appalling that official reports about the extent and nature of the rendition, detention and torture that came in their aftermath are still being kept from the American public and even members of Congress charged with overseeing intelligence activities.”

The Times further noted, “The lack of transparency was underlined on Tuesday during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the CIA’s top lawyer. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, disclosed the existence of an internal study done by the CIA under Mr. Brennan’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, that contradicted the agency’s response to the Senate study. Mr. Udall said he believed it was 'consistent with the Intelligence Committee’s report.' Mr. Udall said: “This raises fundamental questions about why a review the CIA conducted internally years ago - and never provided to the committee - is so different from the CIA’s formal response to the committee study.” It went on to say, “The committee must insist on the Obama administration’s cooperation in making public all three documents - the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the official CIA response to it, and the internal CIA study.

“Rendition, illegal detention and torture did not arise on President Obama’s watch. He has repeatedly denounced the use of torture and ended the detention program as one of his first White House acts. But his expansive claims of secrecy have succeeded in blocking victims’ lawsuits and helping to keep details of rendition and torture secret, denying the country a reckoning necessary for the historical record, establishing accountability and avoiding similar human rights violations in the future.”

Public release

Obama has a duty to ensure prompt public release of the documents - minimally redacted to protect genuine national security secrets, not to avoid embarrassment. The US government, under the administration of President George W. Bush, did indeed use torture during its war on terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a new bipartisan study concluded.

Involving both former Republican and Democratic lawmakers, the report produced by The Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, stated that “It is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that officials in the Bush White House bore responsibility for it.

The 577-page report said that never before had there been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

Furthermore, the use of torture has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to US military personnel taken captive,” the report stated.

The report confirmed the illegal engineering of secret imprisonment and “enforced disappearances.” It also laid blame on medical professionals who assisted in the direction and monitoring of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” and with the International Committee of the Red Cross which - after much internal debate - chose to remain publicly silent for months about the US abuses. Those abuses, the report pointed out, were enabled by government lawyers who provided the necessary “acrobatic” legal advice to US leaders.

The authors of the report for The Constitution Project, a popular NGO based in Washington, did not rely on classified material for its study, but did conduct extensive interviews with American and foreign officials, as well as former detainees. The report includes previously undisclosed information pertaining to abusive detainee interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison and “black sites” used by the CIA, as well as prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. It details coercive techniques that were used, which included not only water-boarding of prisoners, but slamming them onto walls, stripping them of clothing, keeping them awake for days, and chaining them into painful positions for hours.

The US War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal law in the United States, required Americans to abide by the same human rights standards that exist on an international level.

Courtesy: Asian Tribune