Obama unequivocal: ‘I believe that waterboarding was torture’
Published: April 29, 2009
Updated 1 year ago
President Barack Obama said unequivocally Wednesday that waterboarding is torture and violates American values, adding that ending the practice has strengthened the United States.
Asked during his “100th Day” news conference whether the Bush administration sanctioned torture, Obama said: “I believe that waterboarding was torture…That’s the opinion of many who have examined the topic.”
Obama did not say, and was not asked by reporters, whether Bush administration officials who approved so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques should be held accountable for allowing illegal actions.
He has tread carefully on the subject since ordering the release of four “torture memos” justifying the interrogation techniques earlier this month, saying that Attorney General Eric Holder would ultimately decide whether to prosecute former officials. Last week, Holder said that “no one is above the law” and that his department would “follow the evidence.”
At the Wednesday evening press conference, Obama said that the American people will eventually recognize that banning torture enhances the U.S. position worldwide. Obama said the prohibition takes away a recruitment tool for al-Qaida and puts the U.S. in a stronger position with allies.
The important point, he said, is not whether torture could yield valuable information from terror suspects, but whether that information could be obtained through other methods.
“We could have gotten this information in other ways,” he said. “In ways that are consistent with our values….In ways that were consistent with who we are.”
The president said that during World War II, as London was under siege, Prime Minister Winston Churchill didn’t allow torture of detainees.
“You start taking short cuts, and overtime, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country. And so I strongly believe that the steps that we’ve taken to prevent these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques will make us stronger over the long term.”
Earlier Wednesday, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into an alleged “systematic programme” of torture at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention camp, following accusations by four former prisoners.
Judge Baltasar Garzon will probe the “perpetrators, the instigators, the necessary collaborators and accomplices” to crimes of torture at the prison at the US naval base in southern Cuba, he said in his ruling.
Garzon said that documents declassified by the US administration and carried by US media “have revealed what was previously a suspicion: the existence of an authorised and systematic programme of torture and mistreatment of persons deprived of their freedom” that flouts international conventions.
This points to “the possible existence of concerted actions by the U.S. administration for the execution of a multitude of crimes of torture against persons deprived of their freedom in Guantanamo and other prisons including that of Bagram” in Afghanistan.
With wire reports.
This video is from CNN’s Newsroom, broadcast Apr. 29, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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And yet he doesn’t want to prosecute the members of his own government that greenlit it? What do you think that says about our government? Complicity in their crimes. R, D, doesn’t matter. They’re out for their own best interests, they don’t care about the public.
Waterboarding is torture. The Treaty on Torture of the Geneva Conventions that we signed clearly specifies that torture is against the law for ANY reason.
Therefore, Obama has admitted that America violated the Geneva Conventions that also state prosecutions for that crime are mandatory.
So either Obama proceeds with prosecuting, or Obama himself becomes a criminal for violating the Treaty by refusing to do so.