Martelen 96

De Nederlandse politiek heeft deze terreur gesteund.

Nightmares made law

Obama is right not to target CIA interrogators. The torture memos
show where blame truly lies

           o Philippe Sands
           o The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009

The four secret US department of justice opinions released this week
are jaw-dropping in their detail. They reveal how far the Bush
administration was prepared to go in sanctioning interrogation
techniques that plainly amount to torture.

The long-awaited publication of the August 2002 memo, signed by Jay
Bybee but largely written by John Yoo, authorises 10 previously
unlawful interrogation techniques. These include slapping, stress
position and sleep deprivation, right up to waterboarding. It is
doubtful a more shocking legal opinion has ever been written. It even
purports to analyse if incarcerating a detainee in a small box with
an insect for company would amount to mental torture (it depends what
you tell him about its sting).

This is the stuff of dark nightmares, the rubber-stamping of policy
rather than legal advice in the sense usually understood. It
indicates how far the Bush administration fell, the kind of reasoning
that infected a raft of policies and to which the British government
often turned a blind eye. It has caused untold damage to US national
security, and to its reputation.

When the memo was written, the administration had already fixed a
policy of abuse, and the torture had already started. Lawyers were
needed to provide the "golden shield" against prosecution. The memo
did not benefit from the usual consultations; the many lawyers who
would have objected were simply cut out of the process. A small group
of lawyer-ideologues became participants in international crime, acts
for which any state may, under the 1984 torture convention, exercise
criminal jurisdiction. The evidence suggests complicity with the
consequences that flowed from these flawed opinions - which went on
to underpin CIA and military interrogations in Guant?namo, Iraq and
beyond in the rendition programme.

Lees verder: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/18/memo-2002-torture-techniques-obama