Between The Lines - Kathy Roberts: Obama Administration Debates on the Bush Administration’s Interpretation of the International Convention Against Torture (Week Ending Nov. 7, 2014)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.

The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling

(Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts: direct or via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

Learn how to support our efforts!

Tweets by @BTLRadioNews

Obama White House Considers Adopting Bush Era Policy Allowing Torture Overseas

Posted Oct. 29, 2014

Interview with Kathy Roberts, legal director with the Center for Justice and Accountability, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

When he was a candidate for the presidency, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of ending U.S. torture that had been endorsed and practiced by George W. Bush's administration. After he was elected and took office Obama issued an executive order in 2009 that prohibited cruel interrogations anywhere – and made it harder for future presidents to return to torture. An Oct. 19 article in the New York Times, titled "Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture," cited a current debate within the Obama administration over whether to adopt the Bush administration’s interpretation that the “The Convention Against Torture" – which the U.S. has ratified – only prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment within the territory of the United States. The White House debate comes as the Obama administration must clarify its position on the torture treaty in November, when a U.S. delegation will travel to Geneva to issue a report to the Committee Against Torture, a U.N. panel that monitors compliance with the treaty.

In a disturbing case of what some observers describe as "blowback," a British hostage held by the ISIS terrorist group reported in a recently released video message that prisoners were waterboarded as punishment for their attempts to escape captivity. Other press reports maintain that ISIS prisoners have been subjected to various other forms of torture before their executions.

The Center for Justice and Accountability is a San Francisco-based human rights group dedicated to deterring torture and other human rights abuses around the world, while advancing the rights of survivors to seek truth, justice and accountability. Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with the center's legal director, Kathy Roberts, who discusses her concern about a current debate on torture within the Obama administration that could revive the Bush administration interpretation that the U.S. government had the option of engaging in cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners it holds abroad.

KATHY ROBERTS: President Obama has made clear that torture and cruel treatment are prohibited by executive order. What the Committee Against Torture has asked him to clarify is, what is the territorial reach of the Convention Against Torture? And, of course, any kind of traditional legal scholarship would say that the CAT prohibits torture everywhere; in fact, it just codifies an underlying international norm that pre-existed the treaty. It's always been illegal – or almost always been illegal – to commit torture or cruel treatment anywhere. What's concerning about this report that came out last week is that there are lawyers in the administration who are pushing for something more like the Bush-era legalistic, if we could call it, interpretation of the treaty, which is to try to find loopholes that are law-free zones within the whole network of treaties. It's not legitimate, logically or morally, or according to principles of international law and interpretation, and it's very dangerous.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Can you explain what the Committee Against Torture is?

KATHY ROBERTS: Under the Convention Against Torture, there's a treaty monitoring body called the Committee Against Torture. Many of the human rights treaties – multilateral human rights treaties have a kind of committee that oversees the reports from states and can ask them questions and makes determinations on how to understand the treaty as time goes by. So the U.S. will be sending a delegation to report on the U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture next month. I'm not sure of the exact time but it should be between November 3rd and the end of November. So they have sent questions asking what the U.S. position is on a number of issues where it remains a bit unclear, so that's their job, to try to determine if the U.S. is still in compliance – or in compliance – and to encourage the U.S. – or whichever country is before it – to comply with the treaty.

BETWEEN THE LINES: My understanding is that lawyers at the State Dept want torture to be illegal everywhere, but that within the Defense Department and the CIA, I think, they're talking about moving back to the Bush-era definition. Can you speak to that, and I wonder how that would play out in the administration.

KATHY ROBERTS: That's my understanding, too, and of course it's always a little difficult to draw too many conclusions from a report of a report of lawyers in different agencies holding different positions, but it's fairly clear that the State Department, the Office of Legal Adviser, issued exhaustive opinions on this point, that international law prohibits torture and the U.S. is committed to not torturing and not creating zones in which cruel treatment is allowed. The idea that you can send refugees who are likely to be tortured straight into countries where they're likely to be tortured, it's not okay just because they're not in U.S. territory. Those sorts of things are fairly standard definitions under the treaty and obligations under the treaty. I think there are apparently lawyers in the military or in the intelligence services or perhaps both who maybe made made nervous about the idea that the U.S. has legal obligations outside of the U.S. on sort of policy commitments, that we'd like to reserve the ability to change our minds. I think this is obviously a bit misguided, since the U.S. doesn't have the option to make torture legal somewhere, but it sends a message to other countries and armed groups and actors around the world that the U.S. might consider this prohibition optional, which I think is a lot more dangerous ... I would assume there are people in the Department of Defense and the CIA who are also concerned about the dangers raised by that.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Kathy Roberts, your organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, sent a letter last week to Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and other officials about this issue. What was the focus of your letter?

KATHY ROBERTS: We sent the letter primarily to express our concern and to urge her and these other officials to maintain the only legally available position, which is that torture and cruel treatment are illegal everywhere.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Do you expect to get some kind of answer, or do you think you'll just be ignored?

KATHY ROBERTS: I don't expect to get an answer, but I also don't expect to be ignored. We do have a democracy and our government should listen to its constituents, and I believe that the people receiving this letter will be aware –they'll at least be put on notice that the public is concerned, that we're concerned. I think we're not the only ones engaging these government officials now. I'm sure they're engaging each other quite vigorously.

CJA is an international human rights organization dedicated to deterring torture and other human rights abuses around the world and advancing the rights of survivals to seek truth, justice and redress, mainly through litigation to hold perpetrators individually accountable and by developing human rights law.

For more information on the Center for Justice and Accountability, visit cja.org.