According to a report by The New York Times, former CIA director Gina Haspel once oversaw the “enhanced interrogation” process in which suspects were tortured via “coercive means”, including the use of waterboarding, in an overseas US prison. This has triggered a public outcry, and the evil deeds of the US "black sites" once again have drawn widespread criticism from the international community. The black sites are typical examples of the US' trampling on the rule of law and violation of human rights.
The US has set up "black sites" in multiple countries under the guise of fighting terrorism. The report of the Costs of War Project by Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University points out that following the 9/11 attacks, the US has orchestrated a system of "black sites" throughout the world in at least 54 countries and regions, where over 100,000 people were detained, including Muslims, women and children.
The US "black sites" have been notorious for extremely outrageous cruelty in interrogation. According to media reports, the egregious Guantánamo Bay detention camp, the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are caught up in prisoner abuse scandals, with the use of brutal and horrifying “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and personal humiliation. A detainee was even used as a living prop to teach trainee interrogators of the CIA, who lined up to take turns knocking his head against a plywood wall and dousing him with ice-cold water. The tortures against humanity have left him devastated both physically and mentally.
An independent panel of experts on human rights as appointed by the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement in January this year, stating that for the past 20 years, the US has arbitrarily detained people without trial or due process at Guantanamo Bay, and subjected them to torture or ill-treatment, which has violated the International Human Rights Law (IHRL), a "stain on the US government's commitment to the rule of law." The panel urged the US to close its Guantánamo Bay detention camp and end "an ugly page of wantonly violating human rights".
However, the US has turned a deaf ear to the concerns of the international community. In the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, only low-level US soldiers were brought to trial and convicted, but all the senior US military and government officials and private military contractors (PMCs) involved were exempted from trial ; the US deliberately destroyed 92 videotapes, which contained direct evidence to the torture in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and the US Department of Justice has refused to press charges against the personnel involved; at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the site of a secret prison, a suspect was tortured to death, but the relevant staff got promoted and granted with bonuses with no punishment at all... What the US has done is a stinging satire on its self-proclaimed "global human rights defender".
The US has accustomed to pointing fingers at others to interfere in others' domestic affairs under the disguise of human rights, while gets utterly discomfited with fact-based investigations carried out by international agencies against itself. A "torture report" disclosed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 was extensively edited. In addition, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) insisted on investigating possible war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed by the US military and intelligence officials in Afghanistan, the US government blatantly imposed economic sanctions and visa restrictions on a number of officials, including the ICC Chief Prosecutor.
The US government's outrageous human rights record, both at home and abroad, has left a deep impression globally. The obsession with American hegemony has made the US a negative example of violating human rights across the world. On the issue of human rights, what the US needs to do is to introspect much about and correct its own wrongdoings, striving to eliminate its own human rights debt, instead of politicizing human rights issues and interfering in other countries' internal affairs under the pretext of human rights. The hypocrisy of American-style human rights can do nothing to improve the human rights situation and international image of the US.
Editor's Note: This article is originally published on paper.people.com.cn, and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
