Elie Wiesel Quotes
No commandment surpasses the one concerning the liberation of hostages, for they are among the starving, the thirsting, the stripped, always in danger of death.
The treaty to which he referred was The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. During the George W. Bush administration the CIA had tortured 3 captives in the War on Terror. The CIA destroyed the video tapes of the torture sessions and many Americans wanted President Obama to investigate and prosecute the torturers in accordance with the requirements of the treaty when there is a torture incident. However, a major ethical and legal complication was that the Bush Administration had issued an official legal memorandum to the CIA which said that the forms of torture that they used, water boarding, was not legally torture. Most legal scholars agree that this legal opinion was incorrect and America had previously prosecuted and punished the few American soldiers who had used Waterboarding. President Obama decided that since the CIA torturers, had been authorized in writing, that a criminal prosecution would be unfair. He also declined to have the Justice Department investigate the torture incidents, Many disagreed, and this quotation summarized their point of view. See {642428} for some of the language of the Convention.
Many cultures and nations, even after a century will not admit to the human rights violations that previous governments might have committed. Most dramatic is the Turkish government's not even allowing studies or discussions about the organized government mass murders of citizens of Armenian extraction—–the so called "Armenian Genocide ", but even in his native Poland there was and has been little admission of those Poles who collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis in the murder of millions of polish citizens and stole the residences, farms and other properties of Jews and other Poles who the Germans sent to concentration camps and even for the few who survived threatened them with death when they returned to reclaim their own property. Most modern societies have great difficulty coming to grips with police brutality and often denying that it is an endemic problem as opposed to one or two "bad apples".
Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
