UN Says Waterboarding Is Torture

By Cernig

It doesn't get clearer than this:

The controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding and used by the United States qualifies as torture, the U.N. human rights chief said on Friday.

"I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture," the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City.

Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress on Tuesday his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the September 11 attacks.

Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said.

"There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction ... to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress," Arbour said.

The U.S. Congress is considering banning the practice, in which prisoners are immobilized and water is poured into their breathing passages to simulate drowning.

Arbour referred to an arrest warrant issued in 1998 by a Spanish judge for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died in 2006, on charges of torture, murder and kidnapping in the years that followed his 1973 coup.

Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s were known to use waterboarding on political prisoners.

The U.S. is a signatory to the U.N. Convention against Torture. That, under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, makes the Treaty provisions for waterboarding as torture enforceable as U.S. law as well, unless and until the Supreme Court rules waterboarding is legal. Go read it. If you wonder why Bush, Cheney and every single person involved in waterboarding have not yet been indicted preliminary to trail in a criminal court, the simplest answer is that no-one in Congress or federal law enforcement has the cojones to do so - and so the U.S. continues to belong to that elite club of nations who condone and enable torturers escaping justice.