UN torture envoy: US must prosecute Bush lawyers
The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.
Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.
"That's exactly what I call complicity or participation" to torture as defined by the convention, Nowak said at a news conference. "At that time, every reasonable person would know that waterboarding, for instance, is torture."
Which I suppose is why every single american that needs to have SERE training is waterboarded because we like to torture our own people. We have no place and no function in the UN. We can do nothing to advance freedom in the UN as it is constituted. We can not even advance the cause of peace in the UN. We have no business remaining in a moribund organization manipulated for racist and genocidal reasons on the best of days by barbaric and cynical regimes. I don't even want to argue with those people anymore The Jets need a new stadium. The east river seems like a great spot to me.