Thursday, Jan 22nd
Last update09:12:25 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
In an interview with Fox News to be aired this Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney said he is “OK” with CIA interrogations that violated Justice Department guidelines and condemned the prospect of any investigation of abuses as potentially “devastating” to morale.
The 2004 Inspector General’s report released on Monday cited numerous cases of possible violations of the felony torture statute.
"The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns," Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday.
The Nobel Prize laureate spoke to Haaretz in Jerusalem as the organization The Elders concluded its tour of Israel and the West Bank. He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, "as it should be." "But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians."
Human rights groups and many law enforcement officials dismiss as ludicrous the notion that maximum security prisons cannot keep convicted terrorists securely locked up.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, noted that a separate memo, dated May 7, 2004, and released this week, gives a different reason for keeping detainees in isolation: They might share information about the conditions of their captivity.
Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch.
The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy.
This is the most professional version of the widespread torture authorized by Bush and conducted in every theater of combat, by every branch of the armed forces, directed that all prisoners could be potential terrorists and therefore outside civilizational norms of humane treatment.
The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives I would have believed him.
The CIA removed its station chief in Iraq and reorganized its operations there in late 2003 following "potentially very serious leadership lapses" that included the deaths of detainees in the U.S. custody, according to a newly released document and former senior officials.
The memorandum and other partially declassified documents shed a rare light on the abuse and death of detainees in CIA custody, a subject the agency has long sought to shield from public view.
On Monday, the Obama administration released newly declassified 2004 CIA documents detailing the Bush administration's policy of capturing suspected terrorists and interrogating them in overseas prisons. Some highlights:
- CIA operatives used "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques" that went even farther than the already permissive Justice Department legal opinions allowed.
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