Daily criticizes UNHRC for ignoring CIA torture report

Tehran, Nov 24, IRNA - 'Kayhan International' on Monday criticized the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for turning a blind eye to a CIA torture report. This is the very same UNHRC and the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, which are obsessed with accusing Iran of violating human rights regulations in any given opportunity, the English-language daily vehemently criticized in its Viewpoint column. The White House, the paper believes, is stalling release of a torture report because of a high-level disagreement over what the public can know about abuses by CIA. This is while transparency advocates say the public must know about CIA torture program, it noted. Elaborating on the issue, the paper noted that several reasons exist why the torture report is 'being slow-walked to death” by the US administration. They are doing everything they can to stop its release and it’s easy to see why: 1. Obama promised to end the torture of terror suspects, yet continued the use of torture through rendition. He resurrected special military courts at Guantanamo Bay – the place he had promised to shut down. 2. Obama promised to prosecute the torturers and those who ordered the torture. But he didn’t. He became an accessory to the war crimes the Bush administration committed. 3. Obama never conducted any criminal investigation into the role of the architects of the torture program in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay. He never held to account those responsible. It is unfortunate that the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly’s Third Committee are not issuing any observation or criticism of the US torture program. As always, they are too politicized to expose the truth about detainee abuse – even though the torture program is still part of an endemic system of abuse within the US government. As maintained by advocacy groups like RootsAction, Demand Progress, Win Without War, CodePink, and USAction, both the Third Committee and the UNHRC are duty-bound to give the public a look at the scope of abuses perpetrated by CIA. They have no obligation to wait for permission from the White House to act, underscored the paper. The UN should make it public that the Obama administration has stained themselves with these crimes as well. This is because the Obama administration even acknowledges that they are still relieving, comforting and assisting those who torture and countenance torture, it wrote. As it stands, the report will never be released to public. So the UN rights bodies can at least urge the US government to simply enter the report into the public record, as a way to inform the American public, and the world, of the full scope of the tactics used by CIA agents during the earlier years of the so-called war on terror. As maintained by Senator Rockefeller, this can at least 'make a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad.” It’s the only way to stop a repeat of those crimes in the future, concluded the paper./end