Suzanimal
12-11-2014, 04:51 PM
Too long to cut-n-paste.
Torture is illegal. Americans tortured. Why isn't anyone being prosecuted?
If you're following the revelations from the Senate's newly-released report on CIA torture, two questions might have crossed your mind. Will anyone be prosecuted for this? And if not, why not?
The answer is that, no, there probably will be no major prosecutions for torture, at least not in the US. While torture is illegal under US and international law, most of the legal avenues that could be used to hold CIA and higher officials accountable have been closed off, one by one — many by the Obama administration.
There are three main kinds of possible torture prosecutions: US prosecution for following the Bush administration's rules for torture, US prosecution for going beyond those rules, and foreign prosecution for torturing at all. Here's why none of those three is likely to result in any convictions.
The difference between the kinds of possible torture prosecutions has to do with the way that the Bush administration, in 2002, gave itself legal permission to torture.
Torture is specifically banned under federal and international law. Yet the Bush administration argued that its actions were legal in its infamous 2002 "torture memos," which were drafted and approved by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. One such memo specifically approved "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding. Another memo advised that either the president's executive authority or arguments of necessity (that the action was necessary to avoid a greater evil) could potentially be used as legal cover for even more extreme acts, as Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg View.
Just because the Bush administration deemed certain activities legal, though, doesn't necessarily mean the court system would agree. So it's theoretically possible that Bush-era officials responsible for torture who followed the administration's guidance could still be legally prosecutable.
Separately, some officials who went beyond that guidance could also theoretically be prosecuted for going outside of the approved tactics. One CIA contractor, David Passaro, was convicted for his involvement in a detainee's death back during the Bush administration. Apart from Passaro, no civilians have been prosecuted for involvement in the CIA's interrogation program, though some low-level military officials have been prosecuted for other cases of detainee abuse.
"Nobody is above the law," then-Senator Obama said in 2008, when asked whether he'd prosecute Bush administration or CIA officials for torture-related offenses. But he said he also worried that investigations could be viewed as a "partisan witch hunt." Once he took office, the latter view seems to have trumped the former, and Obama quickly decided not to even open cases against either officials who followed Bush administration "rules" on torture or the officials who wrote those rules in the first place.
...
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/11/7367543/torture-report-prosecutions
Torture is illegal. Americans tortured. Why isn't anyone being prosecuted?
If you're following the revelations from the Senate's newly-released report on CIA torture, two questions might have crossed your mind. Will anyone be prosecuted for this? And if not, why not?
The answer is that, no, there probably will be no major prosecutions for torture, at least not in the US. While torture is illegal under US and international law, most of the legal avenues that could be used to hold CIA and higher officials accountable have been closed off, one by one — many by the Obama administration.
There are three main kinds of possible torture prosecutions: US prosecution for following the Bush administration's rules for torture, US prosecution for going beyond those rules, and foreign prosecution for torturing at all. Here's why none of those three is likely to result in any convictions.
The difference between the kinds of possible torture prosecutions has to do with the way that the Bush administration, in 2002, gave itself legal permission to torture.
Torture is specifically banned under federal and international law. Yet the Bush administration argued that its actions were legal in its infamous 2002 "torture memos," which were drafted and approved by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. One such memo specifically approved "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as waterboarding. Another memo advised that either the president's executive authority or arguments of necessity (that the action was necessary to avoid a greater evil) could potentially be used as legal cover for even more extreme acts, as Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg View.
Just because the Bush administration deemed certain activities legal, though, doesn't necessarily mean the court system would agree. So it's theoretically possible that Bush-era officials responsible for torture who followed the administration's guidance could still be legally prosecutable.
Separately, some officials who went beyond that guidance could also theoretically be prosecuted for going outside of the approved tactics. One CIA contractor, David Passaro, was convicted for his involvement in a detainee's death back during the Bush administration. Apart from Passaro, no civilians have been prosecuted for involvement in the CIA's interrogation program, though some low-level military officials have been prosecuted for other cases of detainee abuse.
"Nobody is above the law," then-Senator Obama said in 2008, when asked whether he'd prosecute Bush administration or CIA officials for torture-related offenses. But he said he also worried that investigations could be viewed as a "partisan witch hunt." Once he took office, the latter view seems to have trumped the former, and Obama quickly decided not to even open cases against either officials who followed Bush administration "rules" on torture or the officials who wrote those rules in the first place.
...
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/11/7367543/torture-report-prosecutions