26 January 2017

The US Experience: Exceeding Legal Boundaries in Countering Terrorism


26 January 2017, 12:00 am

with:
Mourad Benchellali
French Guantánamo survivor
Nizar Sassi
French Guantánamo survivor
Lawrence Wilkerson
Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
Alberto Mora
Former General Counsel of the US Navy
Janis Karpinski
Former Commander of the US Military Police in Iraq that operated in Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities
Mark Fallon
Former US counterterrorism investigator, USS Cole attack
and others
 
and others (see full program below, also in French)
 
Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and secret prisons in Eastern Europe. These crimes and sites stand for the so-called "enhanced interrogation" program which the US established post the 9/11 attacks and which was approved by the highest levels of the Bush-Administration. In using these interrogation techniques, US officials committed torture in a number of oversea detention facilities. Although President Obama stopped the program, no prosecution and accountability of high level officials happened in the US. Now with the incoming Donald Trump presidency, there is the real danger that torture may return.
 
In France, for the first time worldwide a summon was issued against former Guantanamo Bay Detention Center Commander Geoffrey Miller to appear before the investigating judge in the Paris district court in March 2016. Further investigative steppes in the on-going investigation of torture of French citizens have been requested by William Bourdon, the acting lawyer in this case. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) from New York support the proceedings.
 
Supported by the Bertha Foundation and Stiftung Menschenrechte now ECCHR and CCR, together with FIDH and LDH bring some of the most important and outspoken critics of the US torture program to Paris.

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