HAVE THEY ADMITTED TORTURE?

A U.N. source has claimed that the Bush administration has acknowledged the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They are no longer trying to duck this, and have respected their obligation to inform the UN,” the Committee member told AFP. “They they will have to explain themselves (to the Committee). Nothing should be kept in the dark.”
UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities. The Committee, which monitors respect for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is gathering information from the US ahead of hearings in May 2006.
Signatories of the convention are expected to submit to scrutiny of their implementation of the 1984 convention and to provide information to the Committee. The document from Washington will not be formally made public until the hearings. “They haven’t avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture,” the Committee member said. “They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished.”

Again, the notion that the administration did nothing to encourage or allow such practices. Then why did the CIA demand memos providing legal cover for their violation of US law? And why did the president create a loop-hole for “military necessity”? I have no way of independently confirming this U.N. source, so the news story has to be treated with some skepticism. But the evidence for serious violations of basic moral codes and U.S. law is mounting.