On Friday, Russia joined the growing list of country telling us to investigate our torture chambers. It may be more noteworthy coming from Russia given the turnabout: back in the day, of course, dissidents and the US pressured the Soviet Union to abide by the human rights treaties it had signed. Then there’s this:
Russia called on the United States to conducted a thorough and objective investigation of the facts of torture of prisoners in U.S. secret prisons and detention centres at Bagram and Guantanamo, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office and other International Organizations in Geneva, Valery Loshchinin, said while discussing the U.S. Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council.
They want us to investigate Bagram. Great: that’s probably where some of our worst abuse currently takes place (when we don’t simply outsource it entirely). And I’m sure Russia enjoys pressuring us to be better overlords in Afghanistan.
And Gitmo: well, sure. While we have investigated some of this torture, there’s the outstanding question what we did at Camp No.
But notice what Loshchinin’s statement doesn’t mention? Our torture chambers in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and Poland. I guess maybe they thought it’d be unseemly to say, “investigate what you’ve been doing at those prisons we used for so many years.”
And on the subject of investigating torture, as we’ve been noting, the statute of limitations on the torture tape destruction expires today. Have we indicted anyone yet?