Red Cross: The US Tortured Detainees in CIA "Black Sites"

From today's New York Times:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration's treatment of al-Qaeda 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 article continues:

The report, an account alleging 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 ICRC 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 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.

The Times report is based on an article in The New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, who obtained a copy of the Red Cross's findings. Danner quotes the specific claim of the ICRC, "The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture."

The response of the US Government? ""It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves." Officially, the Bush Administration only admitted to the use of "waterboarding" against three "high-value" suspects and claimed that the practice was halted in 2004.

The leak of the ICRC report follows last week's publication of a United Nations report that a US-led system authorised torture, a Center for Constitutional Rights study of continuing abuses at Guantanamo Bay,  and a Human Rights Watch report that Britain "colluded" in the torture of detainees.