Human Rights Watch Calls for Criminal Investigation Against George Bush

A US human rights group says former US president George W. Bush and three of his administration’s top officials should be investigated on criminal charges for authorizing the use of torture, RFE/RL reports.

In a new report, Human Rights Watch cites “overwhelming evidence” that Bush ordered the use of torture — including waterboarding and secret rendition — to be used on terrorism suspects from the earliest days after the terror attacks of 2001.
“The road to the violations … began within days of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, D.C, when the Bush administration began crafting a new set of policies, procedures, and practices for detainees captured in military and counterterrorism operations outside the United States,” the report says.

Titled “Getting Away With Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” the report also contains what the group says is evidence of illegal acts sanctioned by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet.

“The report makes very clear that, looking at the publicly available evidence, there is overwhelming evidence that senior Bush administration officials should be criminally investigated and potentially prosecuted for authorizing torture,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counsel in Human Rights Watch’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program.

The report accuses Bush of ordering the creation of the CIA’s secret program to kidnap and transport terrorism suspects to third countries where they underwent harsh interrogations.

Cheney is accused of being “the driving force behind the establishment of illegal detention policies and the formulation of legal justifications for those policies,” including torture. Ex-CIA Director George Tenet is said to have run the agency’s waterboarding and secret rendition programs.
The rights group says President Barack Obama has a legal duty to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees because the United States — along with more than 140 other countries — is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture.

Human Rights Watch is urging the Obama administration to pursue a criminal investigation against Bush and other former officials, but if that doesn’t happen – as it isn’t likely to – the group wants foreign governments to pursue their own cases.

Prasow says that under the Convention Against Torture’s principle of universal jurisdiction, any country can pass its own legal judgment. “That principle says torture is so egregious, such a horrendous crime that torturers need to be investigated and prosecuted wherever they are found. So if the U.S. doesn’t conduct an investigation, it’s the obligation of other countries that have signed the Torture Convention to do that.”