Has Torture Simply Become Acceptable in the US?

The European Court of Human Rights condemns CIA torture and members of the US Senate intelligence committee calls it "a terrible mistake". But will such criticism be overshadowed by a film that falsely suggests that the use of torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden?

As the court noted, these procedures were part of a standard protocol used by the CIA at the time, described in numerous reports relating to the extraordinary-renditions process and covered by a secret CIA memorandum (PDF) dated December 30, 2004.  The court found that El-Masri had been tortured and sodomized as a result of these procedures. Although the Obama Administration banned torture and ended the extraordinary-renditions program under an Executive Order issued the second day of Obama’s presidency, it remains unclear whether the extraction protocol is still in effect.  In one rendition carried out by the Holder Justice Department in April 2009, similar procedures were used on a defendant in a petty corruption case, though no suppository was applied. The Justice Department vigorously defended the extraction protocol in that case and insisted that the procedures it authorized did not constitute torture. 

The El-Masri ruling is a watershed event principally because it reflects the first high-profile, binding judicial determination that the CIA used torture practices in connection with its renditions program. Thus far, litigation of the issue in the United States has failed as federal courts — deferring to the executive’s attempts to avoid scrutiny of well-documented and severe human rights abuses by invoking secrecy — have generally refused to allow cases to proceed to trial. In the El-Masri case, the government mounted similar defenses based on national-security concerns and secrecy, but the Court refused to prioritize these over well-documented claims of torture. El-Masri’s evidence had been corroborated by a German criminal investigation, and the Court also found that internal U.S. probes, as well as investigations conducted by human rights organizations, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe provided him substantial support.  The Court’s decision required careful cognizance of leaked classified U.S.-government documents, and of U.S. diplomatic cables that affirmed American conniving aimed at blocking criminal probes into the El-Masri case.