A warning for America's torturers

Philippe Sands, international law expert and author of Lawless World, has a simple warning for members of the Bush Administration involved in crafting or implementing America's policies of rendition, torture, and black prisons: don't travel. Because if they do, they may find themselves in the same situation as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet - arrested in a foreign country, awaiting extradition to Spain or some other country with universal jurisdiction for war crimes, on charges of complicity in crimes of torture. Henry Kissinger is already in this situation, and both Donald Rumsfeld and Lt General Ricardo Sanchez are under investigation in Germany. But as the truth about these policies comes out, the net will widen - to include policymakers in the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA and State Department, as well as the field commanders and soldiers who carried out the orders, the CIA operatives who abducted the victims, and the pilots who flew the planes. If their name is in any document, or if they can be identified in any other way, they will face the risk of arrest, extradition, trial and punishment, for the rest of their lives. America may refuse to clean up its own act; the next administration (or the one after that) may refuse to investigate and try these criminals. But the world will not forget, and if America refuses to do its duty in prosecuting those responsible for torture, we will do it for them.