Obama’s Legacy of Impunity for Torture

Atlantic 
By: Adam Serwer

.

Much has been made of President Trump’s disregard for rules and norms—boundaries delineated by ethics and morality if not written laws themselves. But transgressing laws, rules, and norms isn’t the only way to destroy them. Another way is simply not to enforce them.

In that regard, the 44th president, Barack Obama, bears a measure of responsibility for the recklessness of his successor, in particular Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director, to run the agency itself. Haspel oversaw the torture of at least two detainees at a black site during the Bush era, and then played a role in a decision to destroy evidence of their mistreatment …

One of the detainees, Abu Zubaydah, was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, being slammed against a wall, and more. “After several waterboarding sessions,” The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins reported, “Abu Zubaydah was so broken that, when a C.I.A. agent snapped his fingers twice, he would lie down on the waterboard, naked and dirty, to await his torture.” The CIA claimed torturing Abu Zubaydah saved lives; Zubaydah’s FBI interrogator Ali Soufan wrote that all the actionable intelligence was gleaned prior to his being tortured. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another detainee tortured under Haspel’s supervision, provided “essentially no actionable information,” according to a CIA interrogator cited in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report …

 

.

To read the full article please click on the link below:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/obamas-legacy-of-impunity-for-torture/555578/