Leaked ICRC report confirms torture accusations of h igh value detainees in CIA ‘black sites’

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://legalift.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/leaked-icrc-report-confirms-torture-accusations-of-high-value-detainees-in-cia-black-sites/

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Leaked ICRC report confirms torture accusations of high value
detainees in CIA ‘black sites’

Posted on 15 March, 2009 by Mathias Vermeulen

The United States tortured prisoners, according to a secret 2007
report on “The Black Sites” by the International Committee of the Red
Cross [ICRC], excerpted in great detail in the new issue of The New
York Review of Books. From Oct. 6 to 11 2006 and then from Dec. 4 to
14, 2006, Red Cross officials traveled to Guantánamo and began
interviewing the prisoners.Their stated goal was to produce a report
that would “provide a description of the treatment and material
conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in
the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to
almost four and a half years.” The ICRC report was to be given in
strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been
in charge of holding them—in this case the Central Intelligence
Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was
sent on February 14, 2007. As its authors state in their introduction,
“The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the
detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds
particular weight to the information provided below.”According to the
ICRC:

    “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that,
in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while
held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination,
constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill
treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman
or degrading treatment.”

Interestingly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection of human
rights while countering terrorism met with the acting general counsel
of the CIA after he had received the ICRC report. As he stated in par.
34 of his Mission report to the United States:

    In a meeting with the Special Rapporteur, the Acting General
Counsel for the CIA refused to engage in any meaningful interaction
aimed at clarifying the means of compliance with international
standards of methods of interrogation and accountability in respect of
possible abuses. Despite repeated requests on the part of the Special
Rapporteur, the CIA did not make themselves available to meet again
with him. In the light of this lack of cooperation and corroborating
evidence from multiple sources, the Special Rapporteur can only
conclude that the conduct of his country visit gives further support
to the suspicion that the CIA had indeed been involved, and continued
to be involved, in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques that
violate international law.

The article in the NY Review of Books goes in some detail to answer
the question: does torture work?
When the ICRC interviewed Khalid Sheik Mohamed he had the following to say:

    “During the harshest period of my interrogation, I gave a lot of
false information in order to satisfy what I believed the
interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop….
I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent…wasted a
lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in
the US.

And Mark Danner comments:

    In a war that is essentially an insurgency fought on a worldwide
scale—which is to say, a political war, in which the attitudes and
allegiances of young Muslims are the critical target of
opportunity—the United States’ decision to use torture has resulted in
an enormous self-administered defeat, undermining liberal sympathizers
of the United States and convincing others that the country is exactly
as its enemies paint it: a ruthless imperial power determined to
suppress and abuse Muslims. By choosing to torture, we freely chose to
become the caricature they made of us.
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Behoorde Nederland niet tot de: Coalition of the Willing, en dus zowel
direct als indirect medeverantwoordelijk voor de wandaden?
Hoeveel zijn er overgedragen door Nederland, en is daarvan al
vastgesteld dat geen van hen iets dergelijks is overkomen?

Henk Elegeert

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