You Will Anyway: Shadow Report on US Torture Regime

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Shadow Report on US Torture Regime

[A] new report [by advocates from the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School] submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates [the Obama] administration for shielding the officials responsible [for torture in the “War on Terror”] from prosecution.

The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking in scope”, and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it – the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to “promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture.”

The Intercept

That would be pretty much the entire Bush administration, and arguably, Obama and his DOJ, if failure to hold accountable the Bush group is considered consenting, and I think it is.

[The report names] former President George W. Bush, Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo and former CIA contractor James Mitchell, among many others, as individuals sanctioned torture at the highest levels.

[...]

The [...]report cites former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as describing the Bush administration’s legal definition of torture as, “so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein.”

Proud to be an American.

And nothing will come of the report. I assume the UN Committee Against Torture will file it in a cabinet somewhere.

More than 100 organizations and individuals across civil society have already signed on to the report. Advocates for US Torture Prosecutions will continue to gather signatures from individuals and organizations to submit to the UN Committee in Geneva; you can sign on here until November 6.

Harvard Law

Yes, you can, but you're asked to offer some title or institution to which you belong. Apparently, it doesn't matter whether the untitled dregs of American society think there ought to be accountability and prosecution for war crimes.

UPDATE: November 11 - hearings are being live-streamed; US delegation to be called up Wednesday, November 12.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.