UN Official: Obama's decision not to prosecute violates International Law

[HopeOverFear]

Foxnews.com

VIENNA -- President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA operatives who used questionable interrogation practices violates international law, the U.N.'s top torture investigator said Saturday.

On Thursday, Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects under the former Bush administration. The announcement was met with disappointment from human rights groups and former detainees who condemned such methods as torture.

In a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manfred Nowak, an Austrian who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said the United States had committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it.

"They are party to the convention and the convention is very, very clear," Nowak said when asked to confirm comments contained in an interview he gave Austria's Der Standard newspaper. "The fact that you carried out an order doesn't relieve you of your responsibility," he said, adding it could be a mitigating factor.

Nowak, who said he would soon travel to Washington for meetings with officials, also called for a comprehensive independent investigation into the matter and added it was important to compensate the victims.

"Now we need to know all the facts -- not just bits and pieces," Nowak said. "First you need the truth and then you need justice."


P.S.: Read the comments. they're HILARIOUS. They trash the U.N., but don't defend Obama's decision.

[EFerrari]

1. Nowak must be one of those troop hating, enraged Obama haters!

Actually, Nowak may be instrumental in giving the administration the kind of international support it needs to do what it has to do.

[kid a]

2. Obama couldn't have said it better than Nowak. I think they agree:

Nowak said. "First you need the truth and then you need justice."

Obama is right on target with this.

[HopeOverFear]

3. absolutely

[Kaleko]

4. Nudge nudge, wink wink. MAKE the O administration do the right thing.

I, for one, am withholding any more donations until I see evidence that the top perps in the Bush admin are going to be held responsible for their crimes. And I keep telling the Obama folks that in no uncertain terms.

Will it help? I don't know, but last I heard, there are 13 million of us on their email list to hit up for donations.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. I'm sure that President Obama understands our treaty obligations better than some clown from the UN

Our president is a constitutional lawyer!

Who's this Austrian bozo, anyway? "the U.N.'s top torture investigator..." Lah-dee-dah. If this guy was any good at his job we wouldn't have been torturing in the first place. Right?

He probably went to some "torture investigator" correspondence school advertised on a book of matches.

So screw him and the Lipizzaner Stallion he rode in on.

:patriot: :patriot: :patriot: :patriot: :patriot: :patriot: :patriot:

PS: He spelled reporter wrong: "special rapporteur"

Learn English Fritz!

:rofl:

[marshall]

10. White House to Nowak: SUCK IT!!!

Grownups are in charge of this country!

[jamieque]

33. I agree...

In fact... at this point I am beginning to wonder what is the point in having a UN at all. The UN has not been doing nearly enough to deal with the world problems we are all currently facing. They can't do anything about Iran, they refuse to deal with North Korea or the rising threat that China is posing with their unfair, illegal manipulation of international trade. The UN is pretty much useless and powerless.

Maybe a new organization needs to be formed to replace the UN. The UN was itself a replacement for the old League of Nations. I think that the UN as it currently exists has outlived its usefulness. I hate saying that but it is unfortunately true. Everything the USA does in that organization ends up causing us problems in the long run.

Then there is the fact that the damn UN building is on our land as in it sits in New York City which is a major city in OUR country. This country is one of the founding members of the UN. We pay the highest fees to be part of this damn organization and we get treated like trash by it. What the hell is wrong with this picture? Anyone...

I say get rid of the damn useless thing and create something that will work.

[Bluebear]

6. Nowak must be a PUMA!!!11

[AtomicKitten]

7. Hopefully this will nudge public opinion ----> appointment of a Special Prosecutor.

Immunity for the little fish was a trade-off to facilitate release of the torture documents for public consumption.

Those that crafted and ordered torture must be prosecuted. We are contractually obligated by no less than four international treaties to do just that.

The wingnut harangue has now shifted from BushCo's false claim that "we don't torture" to "well, we did it a little bit but dang it worked!"

Go get 'em.

[EFerrari]

8. If the international community steps in, the torturers themselves may not get off.

Then Obama has deniability with the sewer that is CIA.

[AtomicKitten]

9. works for me!

[EFerrari]

11. Yeppers! I want this president to stick around for a second term.

:hi:

[AtomicKitten]

17. Ditto.

:hi:

[Fire1]

19. Indeed. Totally agree.

[Solomon]

12. This is the very point that everybody is mssing in the whole

thing. As usual, people jump to conclusions. This is perfect for Obama. All that Obama spoke to concerning prosectutions pertains to his administration not international law. The international community can prosecute if they want, nothing Obama said contradicts that.

This is an excellent development. The more pressure to prosecute from other sources, the better. They are already wrongfully trying to tag Obama with a vendetta against the right wing. This is good.

[EFerrari]

14. Obama's admin has to appoint a special prosecutor.

He has already asked Spain to back off and the Spanish Court will not UNLESS he does appoint a prosecutor.

And, while Obama is important to me, he's not my first concern in this instance. We are. And if we neglect to seek justice because of something the right wing says or does, we should just give them back the majority because we don't deserve it.

Edit to add: So, yes. It's a very very good development all around for ACLU and the UN to be applying public pressure. Maybe the ICRC will join them! The more, the merrier and the better for Obama. :)

[muryan]

13. What international law?

They very language of the article says "commitment," not a mandate.

[EFerrari]

20. We signed onto Geneva and also the UN torture convention.

It is very clear as some of us were trying to point out last week, and iirc, there are pdfs on the net.

[muryan]

21. Yes, but the word international law is a misnomer

Its still national law, we just agreed to a supranational framework. The jurisdiction and the laws being broken are still under US law

This isn't the EU

[EFerrari]

23. UN officials try not to lecture US presidents about US law.

That's simply a diplomatic gesture.

[Gregorian]

15. This has a good ring to it.

My honest feeling is that Obama knows what he's up against. If he initiates any of these judicial proceedings on his own, the "teabaggers" of the world would unite in rage. I think he's fishing for greater popular support. At that point there will be a floodgate that breaks.


I hope.

[Solomon]

18. Exactly. The best way to build a case is to set it up

correctly. Obama knows how to do that. And nothing is better than having someone else set the matter up for you. All that is necessary, is for you to let people know that you will "listen" and they will set it up for you in matters of this nature. It's also the same reason that Chavez gave Obama the book that he gave him. Chavez thinks that Obama will actually read the book. And he will, because it will give him even more credibility, when they are able to converse about it.

[LWolf]

16. . nt

[ProSense]

22. Nowak has been calling on Obama to do this since January.

Flashback: U.N. special rapporteur on torture calls on U.S. to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld.

Torture memos released, check.

International pressure, check.

Time for the Bush war criminals to lawyer up.

[Solomon]

24. LOL

:thumbsup:

I kept getting hammered for saying that Holder is the most qualified person in America to be attorney general. He knows how to prosecute cases, and by that I mean, he knows how to set them up.

I wish people would be just a tad patient. But alas, as soon as you say that, a slew of people will start posting about how we can't wait, and it's the same ole...

[TankLV]

32. OK - maybe you have something there... Obama has a good track record on everything else...

maybe - just maybe we are impatient for JUSTICE!!!

[AZ Criminal JD]

27. A mid-level UN bureaucrat and a lone Spanish judge not supported by his country

Is not International pressure. There is none.

[ProSense]

28. More people who don't count:

Extent of Health Professionals' Role at CIA Prisons Draws Fresh Outrage From Ethicists:

"The health professionals involved in the CIA program broke the law and shame the bedrock ethical traditions of medicine and psychology," said Frank Donaghue, chief executive of Physicians for Human Rights, an international advocacy group made up of physicians opposed to torture. "All psychologists and physicians found to be involved in the torture of detainees must lose their license and never be allowed to practice again."

Torture: Holding America to account

To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush's authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists - many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands - were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Mr Bush famously claimed in 2006, "does not torture". The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of "prolonged mental harm" which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US attorney general Eric Holder has said, is clear: "Waterboarding is torture."

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration's embrace of torture. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was given access to 14 Guantánamo detainees who had been through the "alternative procedures". Their experiences, retold in two recent essays by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (one of which we republish inside our own Review today), tell of the relentless abuse of detainees who were kept naked in low temperatures for weeks, forced to live in permanent bright light (or total darkness), required to wear nappies, deprived of solid food, blindfolded, shackled, forcibly shaved, and compelled to wear earphones through which loud music was repeatedly played.

The "procedures" discussed in the memos - grasping, slapping, holding, banging against walls, confinement in boxes (sometimes with insects), sleep deprivation, prolonged confinement in "stress positions" and waterboarding - were additional to these. The ICRC heard accounts of most of them from the detainees. These accounts are far more graphic (and even credible) than the cold lawyerish prose of the memos. The ICRC conclusion was emphatic: "The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme, either singly or in combination, constituted torture."

America should hang its head at methods that Dick Cheney still defends (and which, importantly, may not have yielded much good intelligence). Barack Obama did the right thing by ending the abuses within hours of taking office. He did well to publish the legal memos too. In such ways Mr Obama makes clear that his administration is making a clean break with the discredited past, while at the same time graphically reminding the world why that past (and Britain's role in it) was so disgraceful.

On balance Mr Obama may also be right to assure CIA personnel that they will not face prosecution if they carried out their work in good faith based on the old legal advice. But an essential part of the rule of law is that those who break it must be answerable for their actions. The Bush administration crossed a fateful threshold after 9/11. Its officials, including its lawyers, must be accountable for that. It is understandable that Mr Obama does not want his first term to be dominated by a reliving of the past. Yet America will only ensure it does not embrace torture again by getting to the bottom of why it did so this time. A full congressional inquiry is in order, as Speaker Pelosi has hinted. One way or another, those who ordered the abuses, from the president and vice-president down, must answer for them.

[AZ Criminal JD]

29. You are correct. They don't count as "international pressure".

International pressure occurs when many nations act in concert to stop normal diplomatic and/or economic activity by the offending nation. None of that has happened or is even threatened.

[ProSense]

30. International pressure

starts like national pressure. People start demanding action, and governments follow.

The memos were released yesterday. You are seeing the beginning of international pressure.

[ProSense]

25. There is more to Nowak's statements

here.

[Solomon]

26. Drip.. drip..

[TankLV]

31. Mr. Nowak is CORRECT and I HEARTILY AGREE!!!

Obama is WRONG to not persue JUSTICE on this one!!!