The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s torture program was released last week and it demonstrates both that the US used torture methods during interrogation which led to deaths in some cases and that torture was ineffective in obtaining necessary information. The Obama administration worked to suppress and censor the report; and following its release Obama announced that there will be no investigation of those involved in the program. The United Nations disagrees and UN Rapporteur Ben Emmerson is calling for prosecution up to the highest level of office. In addition, the UN has criticized the use of solitary confinement in the US as a domestic form of torture and suggests that it be banned. To discuss the report and the implications of this lack of accountability, we will speak with Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Jeremy Varon of Witness Against Torture.
Listen live at 11 am Eastern here:
The United States is getting away with Torture with Michael Ratner and Jeremy Varon by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant Articles and Websites:
White House Delaying Torture Report, Waiting for Republican Chair by Ali Watkins, Ryan Grim, Sabrina Siddiqui and Michael McAuliff
Obama Urges No Further Investigations or Prosecutions over Torture by Jon Queally
United Nations Condemns US over Torture and Injustice by Ed Pilkington
Torture Turned US Government into a Criminal Enterprise by Rebecca Gordon
Torture Report: UN Official Calls for Prosecution of US Officials by Kevin Zeese
The US has still not admitted the Historic Truth of Torture by Henry Giroux
The Center for Constitutional Rights
Guests:
Michael Ratner was born in Ohio in 1943. He received his law degree from Columbia Law School. He is an attorney and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York. He has represented Guantanamo detainees in front of the United States Supreme Court. Ratner is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of numerous books and articles including “The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book,” “Against War with Iraq,” and “Guantanamo: What the World Should Know,” as well as a textbook on international human rights. Ratner is the co-host of the radio show, “Law and Disorder,” and joins three other lawyers on a radio show that reports legal developments related to civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights. He currently lectures on international human rights litigation at Columbia Law School.
Jeremy Varon is an Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, specializing in modern US history, European and American intellectual history, and German history. He is also an organizer for Witness Against Torture. In 2004 he published Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (University of California Press). He co-edits The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (Routeledge; www.informaworld.com/thesixties), a new academic journal that features interdisciplinary and international research on the “long Sixties” (1954-1975). He has written articles and given numerous talks on the social movements of the 1960s and the politics and ethics of violence. His work in intellectual history concerns the relationships between modernity, knowledge, representation, and power. He is currently working on a book about Holocaust survivors who studied in German universities in the American Zone of occupied Germany just after World War Two. He is involved in various social justice causes and groups, which inform his scholarship and teaching.