Sunday, January 15, 2012 by Common Dreams
Also: British authorities launch a probe into
CIA renditions to Libya
Just days after the 10th anniversary of the Guantánamo, the notorious prison remains in the news. On Thursday, Witness Against Torture led 40 people who were arrested protesting outside of Obama's White House protesting Guantánamo and indefinite detention.
Members of the group "Witness Against Torture" dressed in orange prison
jump suits protest against the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, along
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. January 10, 2012. REUTERS/Larry
Downing Now a Spanish judge has re-launched an investigation into the alleged torture of detainees held at the U.S. detention center.
* * *
UPDATE: The Associated Press is reporting:
Russia Assails US over Guantanamo Prison
MOSCOW — Russia's Foreign Ministry has accused
the U.S. of breaking international law by keeping terror suspects in
indefinite custody without trial at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
In a statement posted on its website Sunday, the
ministry said the prison at the U.S. Navy base in eastern Cuba
represents a "flagrant violation of international law."
The Foreign Ministry also criticized the National
Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama on
Dec. 31, which includes a provision allowing indefinite military
detention without trial. The ministry claimed the act contradicts U.S.
obligations under international humanitarian law.
Russia in the past has reacted angrily to the
accusations of human rights breaches that the U.S. State Department has
leveled at it in its annual reports.
* * *
Carol Rosenberg of the McClatchy Newspapers writes:
A Spanish judge on Friday re-launched an investigation into the alleged torture of detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one day after a British authorities launched a probe into CIA renditions to Libya.The twin developments demonstrated that while the Obama administration has stuck to its promise not to investigate whether Bush administration officials acted illegally by authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques, other countries are still interested in determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.In Madrid, Judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez handed down a 19-page decision Friday in which he said he would seek additional information - medical data, a translation of a Human Rights Watch report, elaboration on material made public by WikiLeaks, and testimony from three senior U.S. military officers who served at Guantanamo - in the case of four released Guantanamo captives who allege they were humiliated and subjected to torture while in U.S. custody. [...]In London, the Crown Prosecution Service and Scotland Yard said Thursday that they would investigate allegations of British involvement in the Bush-era "extraordinary rendition" program, specifically whether British intelligence had a hand in delivering two Libyan opponents of Col. Moammar Gadhafi to Libyan jails, where they were tortured by Gadhafi's secret police.Scotland Yard agreed to go forward on that probe while dropping another involving the interrogation in Morocco of former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed. British human rights activists had sought to hold British intelligence responsible for Mohamed's treatment in Morocco - he called it torture, and the investigators said there was no reason to doubt his account. But they found "it is not possible to bring criminal charges against an identifiable individual."
These crimes are universal
crimes and it's very clear that until the United States holds to
account those responsible for these crimes, other judicial actors in
other countries are going to press for accountability.International
human rights groups have turned to the European courts after losing
successive efforts to bring cases in U.S. courts, which typically
invoked the states secret doctrine to get lawsuits dismissed not on the
merits but as a national security necessity.
"In the globalized world in which we live, justice
processes are going to go forward," said James Goldston, executive
director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group
founded by investor George Soros. "These crimes are universal crimes and
it's very clear that until the United States holds to account those
responsible for these crimes, other judicial actors in other countries
are going to press for accountability."
Goldston said international investigations were
necessary because the United States has heeded President Barack Obama's
call to look forward, not back.
"There's no accountability process," he said.
"There're no court proceedings. There're no truth commissions. There's
even less appetite today than there was three years ago."
