By Spencer
Ackerman
As his inquiry into U.S. drone strikes gets underway, the United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism and human rights has stepped up his rhetoric against the agency he’ll inevitably investigate. The CIA’s torture program was at the center of an “international conspiracy of crime,” he told a U.N. panel on Tuesday.
A handcuff left behind from what the military described
as an al-Qaida torture prison in Iraq, 2008. Photo: U.S. Air Force
As his inquiry into U.S. drone strikes gets underway, the United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism and human rights has stepped up his rhetoric against the agency he’ll inevitably investigate. The CIA’s torture program was at the center of an “international conspiracy of crime,” he told a U.N. panel on Tuesday.
The CIA’s torture in
the last decade is unrelated from its current drone campaign. But Ben Emmerson,
the U.N. rapporteur, will still need access to the drones from a CIA he
portrayed on Tuesday morning as something similar to a Bond villain. In an interview with
Danger Room last month, Emmerson said he was confident the Obama
administration would grant him access to one of its most secretive
counterterrorism programs.
The extent of
international cooperation with the CIA’s torture, detention and rendition regime
during the past decade was the focus of a recent Open Society Institute report.
The Open Society Institute found last month that over 50
nations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa aided the CIA in holding
suspected al-Qaida members, including people ultimately found to be innocent, in
brutal conditions. A former Bush administration State Department official,
Philip Zelikow, told his then-colleagues in 2006 that the CIA torture amounted
to a “felony war
crime.”
Emmerson, speaking to
the U.N. Human Rights Council, called on the Senate intelligence committee to
promptly declassify an extensive inquiry
of its own into CIA torture. He said he was “concerned” that the Obama
administration has declined
to prosecute anyone for authorizing or inflicting torture, warning that such
“impunity” undermined Western calls for entrenching democratic norms in the
Middle East and North Africa.
“It will also take time for the Western democracies to restore
the confidence that was shattered among Muslim communities by the CIA policy of
secret detention, rendition and torture, and the decade of impunity that has
followed,” Emmerson told the panel.
The man most likely
to deal with Emmerson on drones, White House counterterrorism chief John
Brennan, is likely to have to reckon with torture as well. Senators have stalled
John Brennan’s nomination to lead the CIA for reasons
including Brennan’s views on torture, which he publicly condemned and
repudiated during his confirmation hearing last month. A vote on Brennan’s
nomination — which Emmerson has endorsed — could come as early as Tuesday in the
Senate intelligence committee. That might set up a frank talk at a later date
between Brennan and Emmerson.
