:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 3.16.2009 ::

:: Red Cross report: CIA tortured terror suspects ::

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The CIA's secret interrogation program amounted to torture for some of the 14 "high-value detainees" held by the agency, according to published excerpts of an internal 2006 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and excerpted in the April 9 issue of the New York Review of Books.

The neutral, Swiss-based ICRC is designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people detained by an occupying power, to ensure countries respect their obligations under the 1949 accords.

ICRC officials would not confirm details of the report to The Associated Press and denied leaking it.

"We regret that information attributed to the ICRC has been made public. We share our observations and concerns related to U.S. detentions as part of the confidential dialogue we maintain with U.S. authorities and so we do not wish to comment on the substance of the article," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the Geneva headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC generally refuses to comment on its prisoner-of-war investigations, reasoning that it undermines the organization's ability to gain access to the prisoners and influence how they are treated.

A U.S. official familiar with the ICRC report noted that the claims of abuse were made by the alleged terrorists themselves. The official asked to speak anonymously because the CIA interrogation program is classified.

The ICRC was granted private access by the Bush administration to the 14 prisoners after they were moved from secret interrogation sites and prisons to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 2006.

According to the report, as described by Danner, the prisoners separately and consistently described long-term solitary confinement, waterboarding — which simulates drowning — prolonged stress positions, forced prolonged nudity, beatings, denial of solid food and other forms of abuse.

"The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," states the report, according to Danner.

The report was written shortly after then-President George W. Bush publicly declared that the United States does not and had not tortured detainees at secret CIA prisons known as "black sites."

Read more here.

A L S O

Call It Torture
Washington Post

Here's another good reason to have some sort of authoritative public reckoning of the Bush administration's dark legacy: Until we deal with it once and for all, it will come back to haunt us time and time again.

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites
By Mark Danner
The New York Times

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

How should we begin to talk about this?

Read more here.

Tales From Torture’s Dark World
By MARK DANNER
NYT Op-Ed

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

Read more here.

More info from Danner [in .pdf]

posted by me

:: 3:12:00 PM [+] ::
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