Secret Report Documents CIA Torture

Posted on Mar 16, 2009

U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy

Soldiers stand guard over a maximum-security cellblock at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, where the International Committee of the Red Cross interviewed alleged victims of U.S. torture.

President Bush repeatedly claimed that the United States, under his leadership, did not torture, but a confidential report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross found otherwise. The ICRC has a unique global role in monitoring the treatment of prisoners.

The report was not meant for public consumption. However, journalist Mark Danner was able to obtain a copy, which he wrote about in The New York Review of Books.

A BBC summary of some of the ICRC’s findings is below.

BBC:

The methods listed included: Suffocation by water or waterboarding; prolonged stress standing; beating by use of a collar; confinement in a box; prolonged nudity; sleep deprivation and subjection to noise and cold water; and denial of solid food.

“They never used the word ‘torture’... only to ‘hard time’,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is quoted as saying.

“I was never threatened with death, in fact I was told that they would not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the ‘verge of death and back again’.”

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