U.N. points to treaty calling for accountability

GENEVA — One day after the release of a damning Senate report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the United Nation’s top human rights official said Wednesday a key treaty the United States has signed requires that officials be held accountable for torture.

“The Convention Against Torture is crystal clear,” Zeid Raad al Hussein, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights. “It says — and I quote — ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'”

The convention, he said, “lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policymakers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders.”

The rights chief made his remarks on the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the 1984 convention, which the United States and 155 other countries have signed.

Report casts pall on film and its assumptions

NEW YORK — The damning Senate Intelligence Committee report on post-9/11 interrogation techniques has cast a new pall over the 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Kathryn Bigelow’s docudrama about the hunt for Osama bin Laden ignited controversy for implying that the “enhanced” interrogation techniques of the detainee program helped lead to finding bin Laden. Bigelow claimed that torture was a part of the story that couldn’t be ignored.

The Senate report released Tuesday found that the coercive techniques led to no unique intelligence, a conclusion that seemed to officially debunk part of the narrative suggested by “Zero Dark Thirty.” .

Bound edition of report to be sold in stores

NEW YORK — A bound edition of the CIA torture report will be in stores by the end of the month.

Melville House announced Wednesday that it was publishing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” which accused the CIA of inflicting suffering on detainees beyond its legal limits and peddling unsubstantiated stories that harsh interrogations saved American lives.

– From news service reports