It has been admitted by US Federal Government lawyers that the CIA destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations since 9/11 under the Bush Administration. The information was put forward to the courts in regards to a case brought forward by human rights groups involving the alleged interrogation of ‘terrorist detainees’ and use of illegal interrogation methods, such as waterboarding. The tapes are believed to have evidence of human rights abuses and the human rights groups in court with the US Federal Government are making just that claim. This evidence comes out at the same time as protests against human rights abuses in the UK are occurring.

In tandum with this information being released the Obama administration has declassified some important white papers which are at the heart of the issue. The papers claimed that constitutional rights and freedoms especially concerning unlawful search and seizure were not to apply to terror suspects in the United States as long as the President or another high level official gave the go ahead.They went on to also state that freedom of speech and the press may be infringed upon.

Another memo which was released gave evidence to show that the Bush administration was contemplating ways in which to wiretap the civilian population without warrant within two weeks of 9/11. This may come as no surprise but it does lend evidence to the fact that Obama and his administration are in fact working towards greater transparency. Obama has also negated the claims put forwards in these memos until he and his administration might conduct a thorough review of them. Furthermore, the Bush administration negated all of the memos in its final days.

The hangover of those memos of course is the legislative leviathan that is the PATRIOT Act, which still stands in the United States as law. Despite these memos being negated the fact of the matter is that the laws of the United States still may lend themselves to future human rights abuses.

 Print This   Email This   Share/Save