When U.S. President Barack Obama said >earlier this month , “We tortured some folks,” he may have thought he was simply stating, under the cloak of faux hominess, what was obvious to everyone for the best part of a decade.
Yet, in openly admitting that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had used “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Commander-in-Chief has left his administration open to lawsuits calling for the prosecution of the responsible entities and persons under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT).
>Article 4 of the convention, to which the U.S. is party, requires state parties to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law... [and] Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.”
It is worth taking a step back to understand the broader context of the President’s confession.
The broader context First, it came days ahead of the planned release of a 6,000-plus word >Senate report that is expected to issue unprecedented criticism of the CIA for brutalising terrorism suspects through its covert rendition and detention programme, especially as the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding “did not yield any life-saving intelligence.”
“The inability to shut down Guantánamo Bay will remain one of Mr.Obama's biggest failures”
Second, the pressures of November’s mid-term elections may have been weighing on Mr. Obama’s mind as he made the torture admission, perhaps even with the hope that the expression of this anti-torture sentiment would burnish his legacy of walking back some of the more egregious acts of the George W. Bush administration as it trampled on a broad array of civil liberties at home and abroad.
It is true that in 2007, then-Senator Obama said, “The secret authorisation of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security. We must do whatever it takes to track down and capture or kill terrorists, but torture is not a part of the answer.”
Yet, despite the fact that ostensible penitence expressed by the President the U.S. continues to inflict “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to use the language of the UNCAT, on different groups of people at home and abroad, some of these practices undermine Mr. Obama’s campaign promises.
The most obvious among these is the continued detention of nearly 150 “illegal combatants” from the Bush-era occupation of Afghanistan in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, despite at least 86 inmates at one point being cleared for release.
Even though he campaigned in 2008 on the promise to close the prison, Mr. Obama has blamed the U.S. Congress for stymieing his efforts to either move the detainees to the U.S. mainland and face trial in a civilian court or transfer them back to their home nations, such as Afghanistan and Yemen.
But for the man who saw a bitterly divided Congress pass an even more controversial healthcare reform bill in 2010, for the decisive commander who risked it all to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 2011, does this sound like a convincing excuse?
It cannot be that he is >unaware of the consequences of continuing the detainee programme there, especially after tensions at Gitmo have spiked dramatically since last year when approximately 106 inmates went on hunger strike and many were subsequently subjected to a harsh regimen of force-feeding via nasal tubes.
A year ago, Mr. Obama himself admitted that Gitmo was “expensive,” “inefficient,” “hurts us in terms of our international standing,” and was a “recruitment tool for extremists,” even though such words came scarcely three months after the State Department quietly >closed down the office responsible for the inmates’ resettlement, and two years after he issued an executive order allowing indefinite detention without trial of inmates being held at the U.S. military installation.
A second striking example of state-supported cruelty inflicted upon its citizens is the American death row system, where inmates often languish for decades awaiting an appointment with the lethal injection and then, as at least three cases in 2014 prove, go on to endure >agonising deaths linked to the use of untested lethal drugs and botched procedures — all firmly within the definition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
In this case, however, it is a small mercy that some U.S. states have proved to be beacons of enlightened thought on the subject, including California, where >last month a federal judge ruled that the state’s application of capital punishment was so “dysfunctional” that it was unconstitutional.
Role of the media Finally, as The Hindu pointed out >a few years ago , U.S. law enforcement seeking to obfuscate its way out of serious blunders committed and human rights violated would not be able to do so with such success without the help of a pliant media that happily amplifies propagandistic messages.
A 2010 Harvard study titled ‘Torture at Times: A Study of Waterboarding in the Media,’ examined The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times and others and found that from the early 1930s until 2004, these newspapers almost uniformly described waterboarding as torture or implied it was torture, but almost never did so between 2002 and 2008.
Pre-2002, The New York Times (NYT) characterised it as torture in 81.5 per cent of the articles and the Los Angeles Times , in 96.3 per cent of the articles; yet after that year, the usage dropped to 1.4 per cent and 4.8 per cent respectively.
In this context, the >recent comment by NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet that his newspaper would “from now on… use the word ‘torture’ to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information,” — as if they had no inkling over the past decade that the CIA was brutalising “folks” all over the world — sounds hollow, as indeed Mr. Obama’s belated admission does.
