A U.N. torture expert said Saturday that the United States has an obligation to prosecute CIA officers who used harsh interrogation tactics to question detainees in the War on Terror. Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, told the AP that the U.S. had to abide by the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture illegal and seek justice against those who used it. Nowak criticized President Obama’s logic in the decision announced Thursday not to prosecute CIA officers who used the tactics — including waterboarding. “The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility,” Nowak said. (AP)For more than twenty years, officials of Crestwood, a small suburban town in Illinois, pumped water contaminated by carcinogenic toxins to the town’s 11,000 residents to cut costs, a Chicago Tribune investigation found. Even after state environmental officials warned town officials that the water was contaminated by dry-cleaning chemicals and twice cited the town for violating environmental laws, officials continued to use the poisoned source. The officials said in 1986 that they would get all of their tap water from Lake Michigan but continued using the poisoned well for as much as twenty percent of the town’s drinking water, until state environmental officials shut down the well in 2007 after testing it for the first time in twenty years. The state’s environmental protection agency and Attorney General are investigating the matter. (Chicago Tribune)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=143658