Secret Report Documents CIA 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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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.