Dear Mr. Attorney General:
I am an American citizen living in Canada; I am a professor of history at a small liberal arts college in British Columbia.
I have now read a good chunk of the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Report. The actions it describes are appalling.
I am asking that you take action against the perpetrators of those actions under United States and international law.
Were the report merely a catalog of violent acts by brutes and sadists, it would be disturbing enough. But the people who lied, tortured, and even murdered were not just brutes and sadists: they were acting in the name of the United States, and in so acting, have besmirched all Americans at home and abroad
The wrongs committed by the Central Intelligence Agency and those it employed cannot be righted. Yet we must take responsibility for what happened, and we must take action. The publication of the executive summary is a first step toward taking responsibility, but it is not a sufficient one. We have an obligation to pursue the people who committed crimes in our name. That obligation is in part a moral one., rooted in the deep revulsion at crimes against humanity. It was on such a moral principle that the United States, one of the four powers that created the war crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1945-1946, prosecuted the architects and executioners of the Holocaust.
But it is no longer merely a question of principle or of ad-hoc tribunals: it is also a question of statute and treaty law. The United States in 1988 signed the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; in 1994 the U.S. Senate ratified that convention.
There are no significant ambiguities in that convention. Article I defines torture clearly:
For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
This definition clearly includes such things as “waterboarding,” “rectal feeding,” “rectal hydration,” chaining prisoners to walls, suspending them by their arms, and beatings – all of which are documented in the executive summary of the Senate report.
The Convention requires signatory states to prosecute torturers. You, as the chief legal officer of the United States, have a legal and moral obligation to pursue the perpetrators of these crimes. The Federal Torture Act (18 U.S. Code § 2340) gives you ample means to do just that.
This is not a matter of “discretion” or of “looking to the future.” The kind of wrongdoing spelled out in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence demands that you and your office act.
Sincerely,
André Lambelet
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