UN official calls for prosecution of CIA torturers

Reverberations from the US Senate report on the CIA torture of al-Qaeda suspects continue to rage as a United Nations official called for officials involved to be prosecuted amid international condemnation over techniques used in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, said there should be no impunity or statute of limitations time-barring prosecutions against individuals who carried out torture.

In a statement issued on Human Rights Day, the commissioner said the Convention against Torture allows for “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever”, including war, as justification for torture.

“The convention lets no one off the hook - neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders,” he said.

In the US, the debate continued on whether the CIA’s programme produced valuable intelligence preventing further attacks.

Finding challenged

A group of former senior ranking CIA officials, including three ex-directors, challenged the Senate intelligence committee’s central finding that the interrogation techniques did not save lives.

Former directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, together with three ex-deputy directors, wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion article that the report was wrong when it said the CIA lied about its practices during the 2002 to 2007 period when George W Bush was president.

They described the Senate’s report as a “one-sided study, marred by errors of fact and interpretation - essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9-11 attacks”.

Republicans and former Bush aides have accused the Senate intelligence committee of cherry-picking CIA information to support the claim that the interrogations led to no valuable leads.

Practices ‘gruesome’

Outside the US, Germany’s justice minister Heiko Mass condemned the US interrogations programme, telling German newspaper Bild: “The CIA’s practice of torture is gruesome. Nothing justifies such methods. Everybody involved must be legally prosecuted.”

Foreign countries, including some criticised by the US for human rights abuses, condemned the CIA techniques, revealed as “far more brutal” than previously thought in the Senate intelligence committee report released on Tuesday.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman called on the US to “correct its ways and earnestly respect and follow the rules of related international conventions”, while North Korea’s foreign ministry accused the UN of ignoring “inhuman torture practised by the CIA”.

Film director Kathryn Bigelow, whose 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty implied that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques helped to find al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said the issue was complex when asked whether the CIA had lied to her and that the Senate report changed the story.

‘Very complicated’

“We made the movie based on the reporting that we did,” she said on Jon Stewart’s satirical news programme The Daily Show. “I applaud transparency in government, so I think it’s good that it’s out there. It’s complicated. It’s very, very, very complicated.”

The Senate report disputed a claim by the CIA that detainees held by the agency provided the “tipoff” about Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, the courier that led the US to find and kill bin Laden in 2011.

“A review of CIA records found that the initial intelligence obtained, as well as the information the CIA identified as the most critical - or most valuable - on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, was not related to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the report said.

The committee found that as early as 2002, the spying agency had considerable evidence about Bin Laden’s courier, and was tapping his phone and email by the end of that year. A detainee named Hassah Ghul, who had been co-operative from the outset, was crucial to finding al-Kuwaiti.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that it was “unknowable” whether information yielded through the interrogation programme was vital to the killing of bin Laden.

The Senate report criticised the CIA for torturing Mr Ghul by subjecting him to sleep deprivation and stress-inducing positions, which led to “no actionable threat information”.