(Newswire.net — October 21, 2014) — The Obama administration remains divided over what stance a Washington delegation will officially take at the UN-sponsored Committee Against Torture, The New York Times national security journalist Charlie Savage reported on Sunday.
The Times reported that the attorneys who answer to the president have mixed feelings over whether or not the White House should turn to Obama’s predecessor G.W. Bush’s view on such matter, even though Obama clearly stated before and after he was elected that, enhanced interrogation tactics is nothing more than plain torture which will not be tolerated.
However, the Obama administration, “has never officially declared its position on the [UN] treaty, and now, President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view”, Savage wrote.
State Department lawyers are said to be pushing to officially abandon the Bush-era interpretation, but military officials have arguments of their own.
Should Pentagon and CIA attorneys prevail, then the current administration could soon find itself agreeing with past policies that continue to be controversial nearly a decade after the Bush White House’s use of torture started to surface.
Meanwhile, CIA’s Bush-era detention and interrogation program concludes without holding any administration officials responsible for the scandals, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
“This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” a person familiar with the report told McClatchy news service. “It does not look at the Bush administration’s lawyers to see if they were trying to literally do an end run around justice and the law.”
The upcoming meeting will be the first one of Obama’s presidency. It will be a rare opportunity for him to state the United States official stance on the UN treaty, which since the 1980’s has aimed to ensure that prisoners all over the world obtain human conditions.