Exporting torture, importing justice

[Snazzy]

Exporting torture, importing justice

Bush, Cheney and others who approved torture could still face investigation - thanks to Britain and Spain

* David Cole
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 April 2009 13.30 BST

Last month's announcements that Britain and Spain had launched criminal investigations of torture allegations arising out of US interrogation practices had a certain poetic justice. The Bush administration from the outset sought to exploit gaps in legal protections for foreign nationals beyond US borders in its torture policies. Yet now it is precisely foreign investigations and international law that may well force the US to launch an investigation of its own. Globalisation is often criticised for allowing the powerful to avoid legal obligations through outsourcing. But here globalization may work in the other direction, bringing international pressure to bear on the powerful to compel it do what it would rather not.

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While Europe seems willing to investigate, President Obama has thus far been reluctant to initiate a criminal investigation at home. It's not for lack of evidence. Vice-president Dick Cheney admitted that he authorised waterboarding, the CIA concedes that it used the tactic on three detainees and then destroyed tapes of its own conduct, and there are undenied news reports that John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell signed off on waterboarding as well. The current Attorney General, Eric Holder, and CIA director Leon Panetta have both said unequivocally that waterboarding is torture. And the head of Guantánamo military prosecutions dismissed all charges against Mohammed Qahtani after she concluded that he had been tortured pursuant to a policy expressly approved by defense secretary Rumsfeld.

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What's blocking a criminal investigation in the US is not evidence or law, but politics. An indictment of many of the former administration's cabinet officials seems almost as unthinkable as torture itself seemed before 9/11. Even in developed countries with an unbroken history of peaceful democratic transitions, holding former high-level government officials responsible can be extraordinarily difficult.

But this is where international pressure comes in. Judge Garzon's investigation will be run not by a diplomat or politician concerned with avoiding embarrassment and division, but by a judge bound by international and domestic law. As he showed in the Pinochet case, Garzon will do what the law obliges him to do.

And when it comes to torture, the law is clear. Under the international law principle of "universal jurisdiction," if the US does nothing to investigate torture by its own officials, the door is open to prosecution elsewhere. The US itself recognizes this principle; in January a federal judge in Miami sentenced Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, to 97 years for his part in torture inflicted in Liberia.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/apr/10/torture-guantanamo-bay/print

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x439786 for the ICRC report and some other reactions. I thought this Guardian oped could use its own post since at least liberals in London are reading about this.