NBC reports that “The United Nations Committee Against Torture released a report Friday that deeply criticized the U.S.”
Patrick Martin summaries:
The … report today assess[ed] the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.
The report subjected a major country to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including:
- Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners
- Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release
- Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons
- Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions
- Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution
- Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many of them demonstrably innocent or unfairly tried
- Widespread use of solitary confinement, considered a form of torture, at all levels of the prison system
- Severe abuse of juveniles, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups both in police custody and in prisons
- Maintaining a regime of police violence, particularly against young men from racial and ethnic minorities, and refusing to restrain or punish police who kill, wound or torture
…the country named is not China, or Russia, or Iran, or some other target of the American ruling class, but the US itself.
Does the report fit with the self-image propagated by US media owned by corporations intertwined with the US state apparatus, or does it better describe the way we are supposed to see our “enemies”, but never ourselves – a carefully cultivated worldview that serves to justify constant invasion and market expansion through violence?