VIENNA: The United States is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who drafted torture policies and allegedly approved the use of such gruesome tactics, the UN’s top anti-torture envoy said yesterday.
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 UN special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute US 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.”
Nowak, an Austrian law professor, said it was up to US courts and prosecutors to prove that the memos were written with the intention to incite torture.
Nowak also said any probe of questionable CIA interrogation tactics must be independent and have thorough investigative powers. “It can be a congressional investigation commission, a special investigator, but it must be independent and with thorough investigative powers,” Nowak added.
In a related development, Sweden’s military admitted yesterday it examined a CIA plane that landed at a Stockholm airport in 2005, contrary to an official report that found no proof of such flights visiting Swedish airports since 2002.
“We examined the plane but have no other comment,” military spokesman Roger Magnergaard told daily Expressen, which reported the aircraft was being used for a covert prisoner transport.
Until now, Swedish authorities have only confirmed that one CIA plane landed at Stockholm’s Bromma airport in December 2001, to transport two Egyptians expelled from Sweden to Egypt for their suspected involvement in an extremist organization linked to the Al-Qaeda network.
