CIA torturers could still face justice: UN envoy

NEW YORK – Those responsible for the torture of suspected terrorists in the wake of the 11 September attacks cannot dodge justice forever, a top UN human rights official, Juan Mendez, told Middle East Eye.

Mendez criticised US officials for not prosecuting intelligence agents for the widespread use of torture that was detailed in the US government’s own report – a damning probe that was released a year ago this week.

“I’m certainly disappointed that the official policy of the US is to consider that bygones be bygones and to let torturers off the hook, but I wouldn’t say that this will never happen,” Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, told MEE on Sunday.

“Conditions have to fall into place before you can insist on prosecuting perpetrators of mass atrocities and I believe the conditions will, sooner or later, be such that in the US there’ll be justice for the torture that occurred under the so-called global War on Terror.”

Last December, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page summary of a report that found the CIA had used sleep deprivation, “rectal rehydration” and other cruel practices on 119 detainees as it reacted to the September 11 strikes on New York and Washington.

The CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation programme occurred during George W Bush’s presidency from 2002-07. It involved flying captured terrorism suspects to secret “black site” jails for interrogation beyond US borders. 

US President Barack Obama’s administration said it would not prosecute those involved. Mendez, an Argentine who was himself tortured under that country’s military dictatorship, said that the culprits will face justice – even if it takes a long time.

“The insistence on justice does not go away. If we really cannot expect justice to be done now, that doesn’t mean we should not insist upon it, because that is the international standard for all countries, and we cannot hold the US to a different standard,” Mendez told MEE.

“That would be the wrong kind of exceptionalism, which American politicians are so proud of bandying about all the time.”

Mendez is not alone. This week, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said the torture described in the report, which was overseen by Senator Dianne Feinstein, broke the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

“The convention against torture is very clear. Its two central components are that there are no exceptional circumstances that can justify the use of torture, and the second is that all must be held accountable,” said Al-Hussein.

“There is no latitude here, no wriggle room here, you can’t debate it and argue around it.”

This month, the New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch urged the Obama administration to probe 21 former US officials, including Bush, for potential criminal misconduct during the CIA torture scheme.

The group’s executive director Kenneth Roth said the US Senate committee offered enough evidence to open an inquiry and that “Obama’s legacy will forever be poisoned” unless criminal investigations are launched. 

The watchdog also pointed fingers at former Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, former director of the CIA, George Tenet, and former US attorney general John Ashcroft.

Former Bush-era officials and Republican lawmakers have argued that the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” that did not amount to torture and that Feinstein’s report was biased. 

James Mitchell, one of the architects of the interrogation programme, called the allegations a “bunch of hooey”. 

The full, 6,700-page version of the report, which saw six million CIA files studied, has not yet been released. The summary omits sensitive details, including names of CIA staff and the foreign hosts of covert CIA detention centres. 

Last month, senators Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to complain that White House officials were being blocked from reading the full report.

“We hope you agree that the legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they wrote in the letter.

Despite calls from rights groups, US politics has been dominated by new security and terrorism fears following the attacks in Paris on 13 November and San Bernardino, California, on 2 December – both linked to the Islamic State (IS) group of Iraq and Syria.

Last month, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said he would reintroduce waterboarding “in a heartbeat” regardless of whether it resulted in interrogators getting any useful information from those being tortured.

“Conditions seem to be going the wrong direction because every time there’s an electoral campaign, the mood of the electorate is strong in the other direction. Especially when it comes to the way torture was practiced,” said Mendez.

Mendez also criticised US officials for not allowing him to properly study allegations of torture at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where some 107 men from 20 countries remain in custody.

Mendez is allowed to visit the centre, but not allowed to talk with detainees – meaning that he cannot undertake the trip.

“I cannot let the authorities of a country tell me I can visit prisons but not talk to prisoners or that I can visit prisons, but they select who I get to talk to,” he told MEE. 

“If I accepted those terms, you can imagine my visits to places like Brazil, Mexico, Morocco and Tunisia, would be under very different terms.”

Obama, who campaigned on a promise to close the controversial prison, views it as a harmful symbol of rights violations and detention without charge that was inherited from his Republican predecessor, Bush.

US defence officials are expected soon to unveil a long-awaited plan outlining how they would close the detention centre at Guantanamo despite fierce resistance to shuttering the facility in Congress.