From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish “enforced disappearances” so that those overseeing the CIA’s secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.
The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites.
Instead of embracing a far-reaching ban on arrests, detentions and abductions of people without disclosing their fate or whereabouts or ensuring “the protection of the law,” the United States pressed in 2004 for a more limited prohibition on intentionally placing detainees outside legal protections for “a prolonged period of time.”
At the time, the CIA secretly held about a dozen prisoners.
Foreign governments called the U.S.-preferred wording, vague and stated that proving intent would be hard and should not be necessary.
The Bush administration declined to endorse the treaty’s broadly worded ban, which at least 81 countries have signed, including the entire European Union and many nations with checkered human rights records, such as Algeria, Argentina, Cuba and Guatemala.
A White House official said the Obama administration is reviewing the U.S. stance.
