Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Justice Department has closed an investigation into the deaths of two detainees held, interrogated, and allegedly tortured by the CIA, sealing the Obama administration’s legacy of impunity for Bush-era torture and prisoner abuse.
Mr. Holder said no charges will be brought “because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The investigation centered on Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi, both of whom died after being tortured by CIA interrogators. Rahman in 2002 after being shackled to a cold concrete wall in a secret CIA prison in northern Kabul, Afghanistan, known as the Salt Pit.
Jamadi died in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after CIA officers beat him severely, stripped him naked, put a bag over his head, cuffed his hands behind his back and chained his arms to a barred window, stretching and breaking his arms.
One witness to Jamadi’s treatment, reported Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, recalled that as Jamadi was being beaten he moaned “I’m dying, I’m dying.” To which the CIA interrogator replied, “I don’t care. You’ll be wishing you were dying.” A military autopsy later declared al-Jamadi’s death a homicide.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the decision not to charge anyone with what was essentially the murder of two suspects was “nothing short of a scandal.”
“The Justice Department has declined to bring charges against the officials who authorized torture, the lawyers who sought to legitimate it, and the interrogators who used it. It has successfully shut down every legal suit meant to hold officials civilly liable,” Mr. Jaffer said in a statement.
“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognized prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment,” Jaffer added.
We have met the tortuous terrorists and, they are us.
Look, Obama is following whatever the path left by George W. Bush to follow. Look: they all need to follow one and the other, otherwise the Paul Wolfowitz the father of all Zionism in US plan is not going to work, if DOJ prosecute Bush and his torturer, then they need to look into Obama and his domestic and international engagement as well, is a GOVERnMENT business and such government stick together for better or worse, for richer or poorer and ETC. Why do you think that president picks his own chief of DOJ…? is not because they are old good university friends, but because this or that good old friends can protect a good old friend.
SHAME ON AMERICA
SHAME ON OBAMA
SHAME ON US AMERICANS
SHAME ON YOU
SHAME ON ME FOR DOING TOO LITTLE
Democrats will kill you many times before they kill you for real, republicans will kill you once and thats it,
George W. Bush that is.
There's alot of truth in that. Deomcrats are exactly the same party – exacty. Wasting your time voting in an election that will change nothing – the height of psychopathology…
Someone once said that those who hunt for monsters to destroy must be careful that they themselves do not become monsters. Aye,we have become the proverbial monster.
America, you have lost any claim to being 'the good guys.' Are you completely stupid as a nation, lost and deluded by your mythological patriotism to a misguided experiment in liberty? The only way to maintain the righteous 'high ground' is to hold to the highest moral standards, and you have abandoned these for expediency and greed for the resources of those you claim to be evil.
Right you are. Americans abandoned the high moral ground around 1600, perhaps earlier.
"Mr. Holder said no charges will be brought “because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That's bullshit. All you need is probable cause to make an arrest, and sufficient evidence of the crime to sustain the charge for a grand jury to indict. Whether or not you get a conviction is ALWAYS up to the jury and NEVER predictable. What's "admissible" is up to the judge (with due respect for precedent).
When did you EVER hear of a cop saying, up front, that the evidence against the arrestee was "inadmissible.?"
If Holder's statement was broadly applied, no one would ever go on trial for anything.
This is COMPLETE bullshit.
sj
A sad day for truth and justice, like all the sad days preceding and following. How can these torturers and their minders walk under the same sun as we do and not fry for the vampires they are? How do we opt out of this evil empire? My heart breaks for those with no hope, whose lives are taken by brute force. I wish I could change things, even put my life on the line for peace and hope, but what can I do?
Three cheers for our war president…errrr…I mean our Nobel Peace Price laureate, of course.