April 11, 2009 in Torture by Scott Horton
A few weeks ago, Mark Danner at the New York Review of Books published an article about a classified International Committee of the Red Cross report written for the CIA’s eyes only. It described in detail the tortures committed against those held in the CIA’s “Ghost Prison” “Black Sites,” including pretty much everything the Soviet GPU would have done.
In my interview with Danner on February 18th, he explained that the U.S. government granted full access to the ICRC in the understanding that the report would be kept between them.
Well, on April, 2, Danner published a second article: “The Red Cross Torture Report: What it Means,” and published also the entire text of the ICRC report.
We here at Antiwar.com just wanted to make sure you all had a chance to read it. Please do.
-thanks to Antiwar.com
ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody
by the International Committee of the Red Cross
43 pp., February 2007
Download the text of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody by The International Committee of the Red Cross, along with the cover letter that accompanied it when it was transmitted to the US government in February 2007. This version, reset by The New York Review, exactly reproduces the original including typographical errors and some omitted words.When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry…. These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.
If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the…enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees…—then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US….—Former Vice President Dick Cheney, February 4, 2009[1]
When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can “let the past be past”—whether or not we can “get beyond it and look forward.” Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of “procedures” applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water,” among others—that were applied to those fourteen “high-value detainees” and likely many more at the “black site” prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents. [READ MORE >]
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