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Amnesty Condemns U.S. for War on Terror Torture
(Kate Kelland, Reuters, October 27, 2004)
The United States has failed to guard against torture and inhuman behavior since launching its "war on terror" after Sept. 11, 2001, Amnesty International said Wednesday in a report just days before the U.S. election. . . . It condemned Bush's response to the 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, saying it had resulted in an "iconography of torture, cruelty and degradation." . . . Amnesty's report accused Washington of stepping onto a "well-trodden path of violating basic rights in the name of national security or 'military necessity'." . . . "The war mentality the government has adopted has not been matched with a commitment to the laws of war and it has discarded fundamental human rights principles along the way," it said. . . . At best, Washington was guilty of setting conditions for torture and cruel treatment by lowering safeguards and failing to respond adequately to allegations of abuse, it said. . . . At worst, it had authorized interrogation techniques which flouted its international obligation to reject torture and ill-treatment under any circumstances. . . . Amnesty said the U.S. and the world would be "haunted by these and other images for years to come." They were "icons of a government's failure to put human rights at its heart." . . . The report -- "Human dignity denied: Torture and accountability in the 'war on terror"' -- urged Bush and Kerry to commit to opening an independent inquiry into all U.S. interrogation and detention policies. . . . "The core message of this report is that the prevention of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is primarily a matter of political will," it said. . . . Amnesty also criticized a tendency in the U.S. to gloss over aspects of war and violence -- referring to torture and degrading treatment as "stress and duress" for example -- which it said threatened to promote tolerance of them. . . . "The human rights violations which the U.S. government has been so reluctant to call torture when committed by its own agents are annually described as such by the State Department when they occur in other countries," the report said. . . . "Double standards have greatly undermined the credibility of the U.S.'s global discourse on human rights," it said.

posted by LoZo 2:00 PM