Calling for Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

Calling for Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Saturday 26 June 2010
by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

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Twelve years after the original International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the landscape has changed profoundly. Seizing on the extraordinary rendition program, the Bush administration involved other countries, including Jordan, Morocco and Syria and established its own secret prisons in countries including Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, as well as indulging in the industrial-scale rendition of prisoners to Guantánamo. It has left in its wake malignant policies, the effects of which have proven difficult to undo, not only at Guantánamo, but also at Bagram in Afghanistan.

This is in spite of the fact that, on his second day in office, President Obama issued an executive order upholding the absolute ban on torture. However, although this purported to mark a clean break with the Bush administration, its impact has been undermined by the refusal of President Obama - or of his Attorney General Eric Holder - to order a thorough, independent investigation into the Bush administration's torture program. This reluctance to address the crimes committed by the previous administration was signaled before Obama took office, when he explained his "belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

The impact of President Obama's torture ban has also been damaged by persistent allegations of torture in a secret prison at Bagram and by the president's inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, for the closure of Guantánamo, where, as critics rightly point out, the open-ended nature of detention is itself a form of abuse. Although the prisoners have had access to lawyers since 2004 and have been able to lodge habeas corpus petitions since June 2008, the underlying situation is not markedly different from how it was in October 2003, when, in a break with protocol, Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told The New York Times, "The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem."

The Obama administration's refusal to open an official investigation into its predecessor's record has allowed admissions of torture to fester, unaddressed or cynically ignored, in almost every policy area relating to the detention of "War on Terror" prisoners. Just before Obama took office, for example, Susan Crawford, a close friend of Vice President Dick Cheney and a retired judge who served as the convening authority for the military commission trial system at Guantánamo, admitted that she had refused to press charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner subjected to a brutal program of "enhanced interrogation" in late 2002 and early 2003, because, as she stated bluntly in an interview with Bob Woodward, "We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture."

Al-Qahtani was not the only prisoner at Guantánamo who was subjected to torture. According to an official who spoke to The New York Times for an article published in January 2005, as many as one in six of the prisoners held were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." Moreover, in the last year and a half, President Obama's inaction has been regularly challenged, in reports on the treatment in secret CIA prisons of 14 "high-value detainees" transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 and in reports of the torture of other prisoners. These have surfaced in the district court in Washington, DC, where judges have been delivering rulings on the prisoners' habeas corpus petitions and to date, have found for the prisoners in 36 out of 50 cases.