Inside the Bush Administration's Lawless Global Torture Regime (And How Obama Remains Complicit)

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http://www.alternet.org/world/inside-bush-administrations-lawless-global-torture-regime-and-how-obama-remains-complicit



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Authored by Amrit Singh, senior legal officer for national security and counterterrorism at the Open Society Foundations, the report fully exposes the shocking breadth of the CIA’s lawlessness in the age of the war on terror.

“There was a need for a comprehensive public record on the scale and scope of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, both in terms of the victims of these operations and the associated human rights abuses, as well as the governments that were complicit,” Singh told AlterNet .

The OSF publication gives names to the people tortured by the CIA, exposes the governments around the globe complicit in America’s torture ring, calls for investigations and accountability for the lawless programs, and makes clear that “extraordinary renditions” were not outlawed by the Obama administration and that the U.S. has a responsibility under the law to investigate and prosecute those behind the global torture program right now. It is at once a call for action directed at the Obama administration and an important historical document that lays bare the utter depravity of the Bush administration’s practices.

The Obama administration’s mantra on the torture carried out under the Bush administration has been to “look forward,” and not backward. This has resulted in grotesque abuses carried out by the CIA being swept under the rug, with no criminal prosecutions forthcoming. And while Obama did sign a much-heralded executive order to ban torture, the order also was “specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for short periods prior to ‘rendering’ them to another country for interrogation or trial,” writes Singh.

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1. Who did President Obama have rendered to another country to be tortured? eom