US - interview

No pardon for torture under Bush, says Human Rights Watch

Article published on the 2008-11-14 Latest update 2008-11-15 08:52 TU

A prisoner at Guantanamo Bay
(Photo/ AFP/US Defence Dept)

Members of the Bush administration should be prosecuted, if they're responsible for torture, says the New York-based Human Rights Watch campaign. On a visit to Paris, the group’s director Ken Roth told RFI that he wants the Guantanamo Bay prison camp closed and an end to the Central Intelligence Agency’s right to detain and interrogate people.

“The first priority is to reverse the disastrous human rights policies of the Bush administration, which decided to fight terrorism by basically ignoring the restraints of human rights law,” says Roth, looking ahead to Obama’s investiture in January.

“There are a number of things that President Obama will be able to do, really on his first day in office. For example, President Bush has refused to apply the relatively good interrogation laws that the US army adopted after the Abu Ghraib scandal [when US troops were found to be humiliating prisoners in Iraq’s most infamous jail].”

Roth says that Bush refused to apply those rules to the CIA, thus allowing the spy agency to use “coercive interrogation”.

He claims a victory for rights campaigns, including his own, in winning a promise from President George Bush, to temporarily close the CIA secret detention centres, “where prisoners basically disappeared without any contact with lawyers, family, the Red Cross … anyone”.

Obama should close them permanently, Roth says, adding that he should “make clear that the CIA is not in the detention business”.

Human Rights Watch is suspicious of some proposals on the fate of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

“There are some people in Washington who are pushing President Obama to simply move Guantanamo onshore and to ask Congress to create a regime of preventive detention, that is the right to detain people without trial and which is the basic problem with Guantanamo,” says Roth.

Human Rights Watch wants detainees to be released or tried in a US court. “If these people have done something wrong, there should be proof presented in court and they should be convicted in a proper procedure, not in the substandard military commissions that have been used in Guantanamo and certainly not just holding them without trial.”

While declaring himself “fairly confident” that Obama will take these measures, Roth says his organisation wants the new president to go further.

“Where I’m a little less confident … is that we believe that they should also establish a sort of truth commission to examine what went wrong, who was responsible and what steps can be taken to ensure that this ugly chapter in American history is never repeated. If among those recommendations is prosecution, we hope that the prosecutions will go forward.”

The US constitution gives an outgoing president the right to grant pardons, including to himself. But Human Rights Watch hopes that those responsible for allowing torture, including so-called “cruel and unusual punishment” such as simulated drowning, or “waterboarding”, will be prosecuted.

“It should not be swept under the rug simply because the person who happened to authorise it might have been the President or the Vice-President of the United States,” Roth says.