The U.S. doesn't do accountability, strong condemnation of others who do though is a part of strong nation myth of being superior, we even wrote the international, and domestic which we strongly prosecute, laws against, but when we do it it actually works, so they claim!
December 23, 2012 - For those of us who have been arguing for years that senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration must be held accountable for the torture program they introduced and used in their “war on terror,” last week was a very interesting week indeed. There were developments in Strasbourg, in London, and in Washington, D.C., that all pointed towards the impossibility of the torturers’ being able to escape accountability forever.
That may be wishful thinking, given the concerted efforts by officials in the United States and elsewhere to avoid having to answer for their crimes, and the ways in which, through legal arguments and backroom deals, they have suppressed all attempts to hold them accountable. However, despite that, it seems that maintaining absolute silence is impossible: last week one breakthrough took place when, unanimously, a 17-judge panel of the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Khaled El-Masri, a German used-car salesman of Lebanese origin. His is one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in the whole of the “war on terror.” See the summary here.
According to the Guardian‘s account, the court stated that “CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on” and “found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning [him].” It also noted, “It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.”
El-Masri was unfortunate enough to have the same name as a man who is alleged to have aided the 9/11 hijackers. When, after a row with his wife, he arrived in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003 for a short break on his own, he was, instead, seized and held in a hotel room for 23 days by Macedonian agents and then handed over to CIA operatives at Skopje airport. read more>>>
No comments:
Post a Comment