By JOHN CHERIAN, Frontline
The Obama administration’s track record so far has not matched the President’s promise to end torture as a policy instrument.
NATI HARNIK/AP
President Barack Obama. He tells Americans just to acknowledge the mistakes and go forward.
SUFFICIENT evidence has emerged to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Pentagon and even the White House under former President George W. Bush in war crimes perpetrated during the “global war against terror”. The horrific photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004 are still etched in the collective memory of the Arab and Islamic world. Since then there have been more graphic exposes of American atrocities connected with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Atrocities similar to those at Abu Ghraib were carried out simultaneously in Baghram and other secret CIA “black sites” all over the world.
The international community had expected the new President of the United States, Barack Obama, to investigate the previous administration’s rendition and torture policies. But until now, the Obama administration has sought to portray these crimes against humanity as random acts by a few rogue elements in the establishment. Before being elected to the presidency, Obama promised the American people to bring about more “transparency” while probing the countless incidents of torture committed during the Bush administration’s eight-year tenure.
Obama had described the practice of “waterboarding”, routinely used by the CIA and the “contractors” hired by it, as torture. The CIA’s Inspector General wrote a critical report on the Bush administration’s torture programme in 2004. This declassified document is expected to be released soon. After taking over seven months ago, Obama ordered the CIA’s interrogation programme closed. He also promised to close down the military prison in Guantanamo Bay within a year.
But his administration’s track record in the past seven months has not matched his promises. Attorney General Eric Holder, according to reports in the U.S. media, has only agreed to hold an inquiry that would be “narrow” in its scope: it would be limited to finding out whether officials went beyond the scope of interrogation and torture techniques authorised by the Bush administration. Waterboarding, used widely in the past seven years, is being virtually glossed over by the Obama administration. “Nothing will be gained from spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” Obama said in March while releasing four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture policies.
On a visit to the CIA headquarters earlier in the year, Obama, while acknowledging that “some mistakes” were made during the Bush presidency, urged Americans to “acknowledge them and just move forward”. The United Nations’ top official on torture-related matters, Manfred Nowak, had to remind him that Washington was obligated under the U.N. Convention Against Torture to act against those responsible for the violation of international law. The U.S. belatedly signed the Convention in 1994, after the Cold War ended.
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