Impunity continues in US

US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Justice Department has decided not to pursue criminal charges following their investigation of the CIA torture programme. Photo by USDAgov, available at Flickr through Creative Commons License.

US Justice Department closes investigation of CIA torture programme with no criminal charges

No one has been charged for any crimes committed during the Bush Administration’s CIA torture programme. US Department of Justice Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday that the department had concluded its investigation and found that, “the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So, yet again, crimes that took place during the Bush era will be pushed aside. Whatever the reasons given for this decision, the reality remains that crimes occurred – torture, rendition, abuse of detainees – in clear violation of well-established international law [PDF]. The ongoing impunity for these abuses and the lack of justice for the victims shows that the U.S. continues to flout the rule of law.

The investigation, broadly speaking, focused on three main areas: detainees allegedly held by the CIA abroad, the destruction of CIA videotaped interrogations, and two deaths in detention. The latter two portions of the investigation had previously been dropped, and the final announcement yesterday pertained only to the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi.

Rahman, a suspected Afghan militant, was taken to a CIA-operated prison near Kabul, called the Salt Pit. Left inside a cold cell and half-naked, Rahman was found dead in the early morning of 20 November 2002. According to the Associated Press, a CIA doctor ruled the cause of his death as hypothermia. His body was never returned to his relatives.

Manadel al-Jamadi was among those detained and interrogated at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He died within five hours of his arrest, and military investigators ruled his death a homicide caused by, “blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration.”

The families of neither of these men will see justice any time soon. No one has been found guilty; no was has had to face criminal charges for their deaths. Impunity continues to reign in the U.S.