CIA torture report sparks renewed calls to prosecute senior US officials

A UN expert on human rights has repeated his call for the US to live up to its international legal obligations and prosecute senior officials who authorised the use of torture.

Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said Eric Holder, the US attorney general, is under an international obligation to reopen inquiries into senior officials alleged to have breached human rights.

Asked whether George W Bush should be prosecuted, Emmerson told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that as a head of state he enjoyed special immunity, but other senior officials should face charges.

“Certainly those at higher levels involved in the commitment of an international crime, a crime of universal jurisdiction, are liable to be charged,” he said.

In a previous statement, following the damning Senate report on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) such as waterboarding, Emmerson pointed out that the UN convention against torture required states to prosecute acts of torture where there was sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction. He pointed out that Barack Obama had already admitted five years ago that the US regarded the use of waterboarding as torture.

“There is therefore no excuse for shielding the perpetrators from justice any longer,” said Emmerson, a British international lawyer serving in the independent post since 2010. He made the comments immediately after the report was released by the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday.

The report found the CIA misled the White House, the Justice Department, Congress and the public over a torture programme, launched in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, that was both ineffective and more brutal than the agency disclosed.

The Obama administration wound up an inquiry into criminal responsibility for the use of torture in 2012, without launching any prosecutions. It is unclear whether the Senate intelligence committee’s findings on the CIA’s interrogation techniques will lead to that decision being reviewed. The White House has shown little inclination to pursue prosecutions that could prove to be politically explosive.

But other governments could arrest and prosecute anyone implicated in the report who happened to be on their territory under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Michael Bochenek, director of law and policy at Amnesty International, suggested that some of the senior Bush administration officials implicated in torture will never leave the US again because of the prospect of arrest.

“If say, one of them goes on holiday in Paris, then France would have the legal obligation to arrest and prosecute that individual. States have clear obligation in cases of torture,” Bochenek told the Guardian this week.

John Brennan, the director of the CIA, struck a defiant tone on Thursday in his first public remarks since the Senate report, insisting the CIA “did a lot of things right” in a time when there were “no easy answers”.

Speaking at CIA headquarters in Virginia, Brennan said his “fervent hope” was that the country would “put aside this debate and move forward to focus on issues that are relevant to our current national security challenge”.

Conceding that some CIA officers used “abhorrent” interrogation techniques, Brennan said it was unknowable whether the agency needed to torture at least 39 detainees from 2002 to 2007 to obtain necessary counter-terrorism intelligence.

He said the CIA did not seek to conduct any more detentions and interrogations, but he deflected an invitation to rule out returning to torture under a post-Obama presidency.

“We are not contemplating at all getting back into the detention programme, using any of those EITs, so I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis,” Brennan said.

Former CIA directors have lambasted the Senate report as a one-sided attack by Democrats. Its three directors when torture took place – George Tenet, Porter Goss and Mike Hayden – blasted it as “marred by errors of fact and interpretation”, in the Wall Street Journal.

Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who continues to defend CIA torture, called the report “full of crap”.