Beijing blasts US hypocrisy as CIA torture condemned

China joined human rights advocates yesterday in criticizing the U.S. over a report on the practice of torture by the CIA.
“China has consistently opposed torture,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday in reference to the report. “We think the U.S. should reflect on that and correct related practices, to earnestly abide by and honor the regulations of international conventions.”
Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday published a summary of their still-classified 6,000-page investigation into the interrogation of terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the panel’s chairman, said the treatment of detainees amounted to torture in some cases.
China led criticism of the report in Asia, where some U.S. embassies issued warnings of a possible backlash against American citizens. The U.S. has repeatedly criticized China for prosecuting rights activists and dissenters in the Communist country.
The Beijing-based Legal Evening News said the CIA report was full of “hair-raising details” that even 6,000 pages could hardly do it justice. State-run Xinhua news organization compiled articles on the report under the title “How Long Can the U.S. Still Masquerade as Human Rights Defender?”
Human rights groups said the report should only be the start of efforts to punish perpetrators and compensate victims.
“Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice,” Steven W. Hawking, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said on the group’s website. “It’s time for accountability, including a full investigation, prosecutions and remedy for victims.”
The report found that suspects were held for days at a time in the dark, handcuffed by the wrists to an overhead bar, and subjected to waterboarding as part of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Such harsh measures after Sept. 11 were described by the U.S. government as necessary to defend the country, and by opponents as a betrayal of the American tradition of civic rights and freedoms.
Ben Emmerson, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said those responsible for the “criminal conspiracy” revealed in the report must be brought to justice.
Emmerson, in a statement on the UN website, said the report’s findings confirm “what the international community has long believed, that there was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration,” which allowed it “to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law.”
The report’s publication could lead to “a flood of litigation,” said Manfred Nowak, a former UN special rapporteur who helped draft the 1984 UN Convention against Torture.
“It’s a big step forward but there’s still a long way to go,” Nowak said in a phone interview from Vienna. “For example, we have proof that the U.S. operated black sites in the European Union – Poland, Lithuania and Romania – that hasn’t been officially recognized.”
Clare Algar, executive director at the U.K.-based human rights group Reprieve, said many of the names of victims were still missing from the report. “We are still a long way from acknowledging the horrors of the CIA’s torture program, and achieving real accountability,” she said in an e-mail.
David Cameron, the U.K. prime minister, said that “after 9/11 there were things that happened that were wrong,” when he was asked about the U.S. report.
“Those of us who want to see a safer, more secure world, who want to see this extremism defeated, we won’t succeed if we lose our moral authority, if we lose the things that make our systems work and our countries successful,” Cameron said at a press conference in Ankara late Tuesday.
Malik Muhammad Rafique Rajwana, a member of the Pakistan Senate’s defense committee, said the torture was a severe crime that should be taken to the International Court of Justice.
“You can’t pick up people, do what you want, then after some time disclose it and go away just because you’re powerful,” he said by phone from Islamabad. “It’s a slap in the face of the civilized world.” Jonathan Tirone, Jeremy Hodges, Kambiz Foroohar and Ting Shi, Bloomberg