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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Overseas, Torture Report Prompts Calls for Prosecution - New York Times





The release of the Senate report on the graphic torture of terrorism suspects by the Bush-era Central Intelligence Agency led to calls at the United Nations and elsewhere on Tuesday for criminal prosecutions and caused an international explosion on social media, including online jihadist exhortations for retaliation.


The State Department warned American citizens in at least two countries where the torture and abuse took place — Thailand and Afghanistan — that they could be confronted with anti-American hostility.


Publicity about the report, the United States Embassy in Bangkok warned on its website, “could prompt anti-U.S. protests and violence against U.S. interests, including private U.S. citizens.”


In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s special investigator on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, said he welcomed the report and commended the Obama administration for having resisted political pressures to suppress it.



Mr. Emmerson, who has long advocated the report’s release, said the United States was obliged, under international law, to hold the wrongdoers accountable.





OPEN Document



Document: The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of Torture


“The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes,” Mr. Emmerson said in a statement posted on the website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.


“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the U.S. government provides no excuse whatsoever,” he said. “Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”


Other international law experts and rights advocates who have long supported an accounting for the C.I.A.'s behavior concurred with that assessment.


Jordan J. Paust, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said the report “adds another layer of proof of serial international criminality that was manifestly authorized” during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office.


In a commentary on Jurist.org, Professor Paust said both the Convention Against Torture and the 1949 Geneva Conventions require the United States to prosecute or extradite any person “reasonably accused of having criminal responsibility” for the documented instances of torture.




Play Video|1:05

Feinstein Defends Torture Report Release



Feinstein Defends Torture Report Release



Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic chairwoman, defended the release of the torture report, saying, “this report is too important to shelve.”


Video by Associated Press on December 9, 2014. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.

“President Obama should confirm to the nation that no one is above the law,” he wrote.


Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on the organization’s website that the Senate report “should forever put to rest C.I.A. denials that it engaged in torture, which is criminal and can never be justified.”


He added, “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of officials, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”


The SITE Intelligence Group, a monitor of Islamic militant web activity based in Bethesda, Md., said the Senate report had “ignited an overwhelming response from the online jihadist community, with many calling for retaliation against the U.S. and promoting jihad.”


More broadly, the report generated an enormous response on Twitter, where the hashtag #TortureReport was among the most popular trending topics, including posts from those who said they had been interrogated. The report also was the top story for hours on the Fars News Agency of Iran.





OPEN Graphic



Graphic: 7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report


“Torture does not tell you anything about the person being tortured but tells you volumes about the person who’s doing the torture,” Maher Arar, a former Canadian detainee of the C.I.A. who was later tortured in Syria, wrote in a Twitter message.


Some Twitter postings from Europe and the Middle East focused on the origins of the C.I.A.'s euphemistic terminology in describing its torture methods.


“The Gestapo called it ‘Verscharfte Vernehmung,'  ” wrote one blogger, Ian Geldard. “Exactly the same term ‘enhanced interrogation’ used by the C.I.A.”


The blogger Libya Liberty said, “Calling torture ‘enhanced interrogation’ is like calling rape ‘enhanced dating.'  ”


Some jihadists used the report to ridicule what they regard as a sanctimonious American preaching about moral values. “They call us monsters?,” Israfil Yilmaz, a Dutch jihadist,wrote on Twitter. “Slap yourself, read some of the @CIA torture reports and wake up.”





OPEN Graphic



Graphic: A History of the C.I.A.’s Secret Interrogation Program


Dinah Alobeid, a spokeswoman for Brandwatch, an international research firm that monitors social media traffic, said 30 percent of the Twitter messages about the Senate reportwere generated outside the United States.


Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, reacting to the report, was contrite about what he described as mistakes made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that spawned the Bush administration’s war on terror, in which the British government was a close partner.


Asked about the report at a news conference while visiting Turkey, Mr. Cameron said, “After 9/11 there were things that happened that were wrong — and we should be clear about the fact that they were wrong.”


Mr. Cameron added, “We won’t succeed if we lose our moral credibility.”


In Germany, the news appeared to reinforce a negative picture of the United States caused by publicity over the police killings of unarmed African-Americans in Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, New York and elsewhere. Major news outlets gave the torture report heavy coverage.


“Brutal, dishonest, illegal,” the Sueddeutsche Zeitung headlined its report. The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung struck a common theme by noting in a commentary that “America is still paying the price for falling short.”


In Yemen, where the United States is often seen through the prism of policies that have long stoked anger — including the detention of Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, as well as missile strikes from drones that have killed Yemeni civilians — there was little sense that the torture report could do much to further sully America’s reputation.


“It makes no difference,” said Nazeeh Alemad, a legal adviser for Yemen’s longtime ruling political party. “People here are not looking for more proof of torture” by the United States, he said. “They deal with it as a fact.”


“What makes a difference is what happens here, not some report published over there,” Mr. Alemad said.



Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger from London, Alison Smale from Berlin, Sebnem Arsu and Rukmini Callimachi from Istanbul, and Kareem Fahim from Sana, Yemen.




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