Red Cross report details CIA war crimes

Red Cross report details CIA war crimes

By Tom Eley 9 April 2009
This week, the New York Review of Books released the full version of an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report detailing US Central Intelligence Agency torture of 14 “high value” terrorist suspects at prison “black sites” from 2001 until 2006. Earlier, it had produced excerpts of the report and an analysis by author Mark Danner.
The report makes explicit that the CIA violated the laws of war and basic human rights in its treatment of the prisoners, which included beatings, humiliations, sleep deprivation, and suffocation by water (“waterboarding”), among dozens of specifically named acts of brutality.
At several points, the 40-page report refers to CIA actions as illegal according to international law. The ICRC, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the body tasked with overseeing observance of the laws of war. That it has declared acts carried out by US intelligence personnel as torture carries enormous legal weight.
Yet the Obama administration has granted blanket immunity to CIA, military and Bush administration officials who ordered and carried out torture and other war crimes. An Obama administration spokesman, Mark Mansfield, told the New York Times that CIA head Leon Panetta “has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.”
The Obama administration is anxious to avoid prosecution of Bush administration officials for two reasons. First, the report stands as a condemnation not only of the Bush administration, but of leading Democrats, who were well aware of torture, illegal detention, extraordinary rendition and other major violations carried out by the US in the “war on terror.”
Second, the Obama administration wishes to maintain Washington’s full arsenal of repression at its disposal, including torture, in order to carry on longstanding imperialist objectives. Indeed, it is very likely the case that similar abuses as those outlined in the ICRC report continue at US military prison camps in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
By virtue of its silence, the US media has joined Obama in its defense of the Bush administration. It should be headline news that the body tasked with overseeing the laws of war, the ICRC, has written a report that all but proves that Washington carried out a large-scale torture operation over several years. But upon its release, the full ICRC report has been relegated to minor-story status by the New York Times, Washington Post and the television media. The story has been all but dropped since.
For its part, the ICRC has condemned the release of the report, which was produced for high-ranking members of the Bush administration and was declared confidential. Danner has not explained how he obtained a copy. However, the ICRC has verified the report’s authenticity.
The methods of the CIA
The testimony of the 14 detainees repeats descriptions of particular forms of abuse again and again. This demonstrates not only the systematic ....


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