War, War, War
See other War, War, War ArticlesTitle: UN torture envoy: US must prosecute Bush lawyers
Source:
KWQC TV
URL Source: http://www.kwqc.com/Global/story.asp?S=10243808&nav=menu83_2
Published: Apr 24, 2009
Author: Associated Press
Post Date: 2009-04-25 10:58:43 by Deasy
Keywords: rendition, zionism, Manfred Nowak, cia
Views: 361
VIENNA (AP) - A United Nations envoy says the U.S. is obligated to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who were behind the policies that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics. The world body's top anti-torture envoy says a U.N. convention requires the U.S. to pursue the case against officials who wrote memos that legitimize torture. He says that also includes CIA officials who said use of the tactics was legal. Manfred Nowak says such actions are called "complicity or participation" to torture as defined by the U.N. convention. The envoy adds that "every reasonable person" would know that waterboarding is torture. Nowak also says failure to investigate could subject those responsible to prosecution aboard. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for the interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.
Poster Comment: See the UN's Special Rapporteur on torture. Also this excerpt from an interview with Open Democracy: An absolute rightKanishk Tharoor: The manifestations of Islamic terrorism present new challenges to the international system and to nation-states - it's subnational, it's transnational. Do you accept claims that the rules and norms are too rigid, and that states should be allowed alternate, albeit unsavoury, means to protect themselves in this day in age?
Manfred Nowak: I accept that 9/11 was a more serious and better coordinated global act of terrorism then before. Usually, we were fighting terrorism as a local phenomenon, whether in Ireland, Spain, Sri Lanka, Italy or elsewhere, and the terrorists were in principle never really "globally networked". In this sense, contemporary Islamic terrorism has a new quality, but this does not mean the rules need to be changed.
We know how to deal with terrorism. And we know how to deal with global organised crime - we learned to deal with the mafia in Italy and Russia, and with trafficking in human beings, drugs, arms and nuclear devices. All these are global, internationally-organised crimes. But still, nobody would say that organized crime needs to change the rules of human rights. The rules should still be the same; suspects should be arrested, brought before justice, and if enough evidence is presented, be sentenced.
It is counterproductive to say that human rights should not be applied since human rights are a very flexible system. Many human rights can and should be restricted in the face of serious challenges; think of freedom of assembly, privacy, and so forth. People are willing to accept necessary infringements on their right to privacy, since such surveillance is proportional to the threat.
But the prohibition of torture is an "absolute right", which means that there is no proportionality to be applied. A little bit of torture doesn't make us safer, it's the opposite. As soon as you undermine the prohibition of torture, and you start in the "ticking bomb scenario" to apply torture, it very quickly spreads and creates new terrorism. We now have more terrorists since we are fighting terrorism by violating our own standards and the international rule of law. From a 2007 interview.
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