The U.S. Senate recently released a report detailing how the CIA used enhanced interrogation techniques on al-Qaida suspects after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the United Nations is now calling for the top officials in the George W. Bush administration who sanctioned those techniques to be brought up on charges and prosecuted, the BBC reports.
“U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson said that senior officials from the administration of George W. Bush who planned and sanctioned crimes must be prosecuted, as well as CIA and U.S. government officials responsible for torture such as waterboarding,” the BBC explained.
“As a matter of international law, the U.S. is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” Emmerson said in a statement.
“The U.S. attorney general is under a legal duty to bring criminal charges against those responsible,” he continued.
The CIA maintains that the interrogation techniques it used saved lives.
Human Rights Watch, another human rights group, agrees with the U.N. and thinks that someone should be held accountable for the “criminal” activities that occurred in those CIA detention camps.
Despite those who have tried to justify the interrogation procedures, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that those techniques “can never be justified.”
Read more at the BBC.