Red Cross says CIA tortured captives -- Secret report suggests international violations

[BuyingThyme]

Red Cross says CIA tortured captives
Secret report suggests international violations
Joby Warrick, Peter Finn And Julie Tate
Washington Post


WASHINGTON – The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaida captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account of alleged physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

The findings were based on an investigation by Red Cross officials who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had previously been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by Red Cross guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released Sunday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

...

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/mar/16/red-cross-says-cia-tortured-captives/

[EFerrari]

1. The RC started protesting to Jerry in 2003 about suspected torture.

We've known this for years.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[BuyingThyme]

3. kcik

[Echo In Light]

4. They reported as much when Abu Ghraib broke, but MSM intentionally ignored the rest...

...and instead focused only on the glaring "bad apples" incident that the public was aware of due to the pictures.

The RC reported at that time that such abuses were routine at numerous U.S. camps/prisons connected to the phony "war on terror."