Morality of U.S. Foreign Policy

According to CBS:

The United States engaged in acts of torture and “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” upon prisoners held at secret detention sites operated by or in conjunction with the CIA, according to details from a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Such acts constitute violations of the United Nations' Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross said.

The ICRC is the appointed legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and oversees the treatment of prisoners of war.

According to author Mark Danner:

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

According to author Chris Floyd:

Obama Justice Dept. defends Rumsfeld in torture case. As Raw Story notes:

Language used in the brief of the individual defendants in the case, including Rumsfeld, having a "clear entitlement to qualified immunity" casts doubt on the hopes of civil and human rights activists that the Justice Department will take up calls to launch criminal prosecutions into the architects and policy designers of some of the most criticized Bush policies such as waterboarding, extraordinary rendition and warrantless wiretapping.