U.N. torture official on America's legal obligations to impose accountability, (excerpt) from Glenn Greenwald article

Thursday April 23, 2009

To read full article see: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/04/23/nowak/index.html?source=rss

“But those who spent the last eight years criticizing the Bush administration for ignoring international conventions and legal obligations -- yet who now want to refrain from investigating Bush crimes -- should at least try to reconcile those past criticisms with their current unilateralist, exceptionalism-based arguments against holding our own criminals accountable (it's different when we do it). And if this is the mentality we're going to adopt -- that we're not bound by our own treaty obligations and need not pay any heed to U.N. positions -- then we probably shouldn't expect that we'll be taken very seriously when we point to international obligations and U.N. pronouncements as a means for claiming that other countries are acting wrongfully. Most people around the world do not accept the overarching belief of our political class that America can and should be exempted from the laws and standards imposed on everyone else.”