Ao recusar julgar torturas da CIA, EUA detona autoridade moral que lhe restava: É país que tortura.
The release of a long-awaited report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program dealt yet another blow to the United States’ moral authority and its credibility as a defender of human rights around the globe. It also begs the question: How much damage must the United States suffer before it learns to take soft power more seriously and, finally, learn to use it more proactively? To understand the immediate damage done to U.S. influence, look no further than the commentary surrounding the report’s release.
According to the Washington Post, the state-run Chinese news service Xinhua editorialized that “America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries,” while a pro-government television commentator in Egypt observed, “The United States cannot demand human rights reports from other countries since this [document] proves they know nothing about human rights.” The Islamic State and other extremists joined the propaganda gold rush. One tweet, quoted in a report from the SITE Intelligence Group, pointed to the audacity of the United States lecturing Muslims about brutality, adding, “Getting beheaded is 100 times more humane, more dignified than what these filthy scumbags do to Muslims.” Such reactions are galling and they do real harm to U.S. credibility. But the fault lies not with those who released the report, as some critics argue, but with those who permitted and perpetrated acts of torture, those who lied about it to America’s elected representatives, and those who willfully kept the president and senior members of the Bush administration in the dark. Their actions undermined not only American values, but also American influence and national security interests. In the words of a former prisoner of war, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the actions laid out in the Senate report “stained our national honor” and “did much harm and little practical good.”
New York Times - Dec 2014 - clik 1 New York Times clama: "julgar torturadores e mandantes por seus brutais crimes, bárbaros".
Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed. Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not.
The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down. Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-pageexecutive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.” These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which definestorture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.
