THE release on Tuesday confirming that CIA officials used torture has only proven that which most people already knew a priori.
The 6000 page Senate report lambasts the intelligence agency for using extreme enhanced interrogation techniques which amounted to torture to gain information. Officials have long hinted at the idea that they may have gone too far in their pursuit of terrorists. Former US President George W Bush dismissed claims of torture, claiming that he had authorised enhanced interrogation techniques, something which the Senate had concluded what many had suspected is merely another name to cover horrendous human rights abuses.
Messers Bush, Blair et al may attempt to cleanse their souls through semantic debate but this report will leave them nowhere to turn.
More than that though it will weaken the West in the eyes of the world an diminishes it ability to act as the policemen to the world. No longer can America and Britain claim the moral high ground in their battle against extremists such as Islamic State. There may be those who claim that torture was necessary to protect freedom and democracy from terrorist threats. What they forgot was that for freedom to exist it must exist for all or it exists for none. By judging that they could discard human rights for suspected terrorists they undermined the very foundation of the democracy they claim they were protecting.
It is too late now to backtrack. It is too late to apologise and move on. The damage has been done. The threat which the CIA was trying to battle through torture has been strengthened by its actions. To think that this will be anything other than a rallying call to terror groups would be delusional at best. This is not to say that it should not have been published though. What needs to happen now, however, is that the full weight of international law needs to be used against those accused.
If the enemies of freedom and democracy are to be truly defeated then it will not be through torture. It will be by showing that no-one is above the law. That everyone is equal and deserves to be treated as such in the international theatre.
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emmerson has stepped forward to demand just such an action.
"As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice," Mr Emmerson said in a statement made from Geneva.
"The US attorney general is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible."
It had previously been claimed by officials that it was only left wing conspiracy theorists who would call for President Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair to be indicted for war crimes. Anyone who thought otherwise was in their view just as bad as the terrorists themselves. To prevent those terrorist groups gaining ground these officials must now recognise that a trial for war crimes is the only way to restore faith and hope in freedom and democracy.
