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No more empty promises By: Jessica Evans Philippine Daily Inquirer Presidents Benigno Aquino III and Barack Obama each entered office with promises to end abuses by their respective country’s security forces. While the abuses, abusers and responses differ, the Aquino and Obama administrations share a common failure. Although the United States has a much better…

Human Rights Online Philippines

September 6, 2011

2–3 minutes

Barack Obama, Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, George W Bush, Presidency of George W. Bush, United States

No more empty promises
By: Jessica Evans
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Presidents Benigno Aquino III and Barack Obama each entered office with promises to end abuses by their respective country’s security forces. While the abuses, abusers and responses differ, the Aquino and Obama administrations share a common failure. Although the United States has a much better track record than the Philippines for investigating and prosecuting military abuses, neither government has effectively investigated or prosecuted senior government officials responsible for planning and authorizing the abuses.

In July, Human Rights Watch called on the US government to open criminal investigations into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by senior Bush administration officials. The 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. Such acts violated the Convention against Torture, the laws of war, and other international treaties binding on the United States.

The Obama administration’s only attempt to look at past abuses has been a wholly insufficient inquiry led by a federal prosecutor, John Durham. It did not investigate the use of interrogation methods that Bush administration lawyers deemed lawful in the now notorious “torture memos,” even though the methods plainly amounted to torture and other illegal acts. Instead, it looked only into cases in which CIA interrogators went beyond what government lawyers authorized, and then only decided to pursue two of about 100 cases it reviewed.

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