Mark Danner: "US Torture - Voices from the Black Sites"

Related Post: Red Cross - The US Tortured Detainees in CIA “Black Sites”

The opening of Mark Danner's article from The New York Review of Books:

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

How should we begin to talk about this? Perhaps with a story. Stories come to us newborn, announcing their intent: Once upon a time... In the beginning... From such signs we learn how to listen to what will come. Consider:

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4m x 4m [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed....

A man, unnamed, naked, strapped to a bed, and for the rest, the elemental facts of space and of time, nothing but whiteness.

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.