Mark Danner, The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means. The New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009. “Working through the forty-three pages of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s report [of February 2007], one finds a strikingly detailed account of horrors inflicted on fourteen ‘high-value detainees’ over a period of weeks and months—horrors that Red Cross officials conclude, quite unequivocally, ‘constituted torture.'”
Excerpts from story:
In setting out after September 11 to “do whatever it takes” in the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of protecting the country against “evil people,” Bush administration officials were modern people treading a timeless road. However impressive the advanced degrees of the consultants they hired, the techniques of “enhanced interrogation” are in their essence ancient, for they play on emotions and physical realities that are basic and unchanging….
How to inflict pain without causing injury that might inhibit or prevent further interrogation? And how to do so in such a way that the pain inflicted might be said not to be akin to that “associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result”? This was of course the legal definition of torture concocted by White House and Justice Department lawyers (and codified in what has come to be known as the “Torture Memo,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee on August 1, 2002). The challenging task set before these lawyers was to somehow “make legal” a set of techniques that had originated in a program developed expressly to prepare soldiers for techniques that were illegal, and thereby to offer officials and interrogators a “golden shield” that would suffice to convince them they would be protected from legal consequences.)
In answer to these questions, and with the benefit of experimentation, especially on Mr. Abu Zubaydah, one of the first of the alleged “big fish” al-Qaeda captives, the CIA seems to have arrived at a method that is codified by the International Committee of the Red Cross experts into twelve basic techniques, as follows:
- Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth…
- Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head…
- Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees’ neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall…
- Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face…
- Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement…
- Prolonged nudity…this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months…
- Sleep deprivation…through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music…
- Exposure to cold temperature…especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and…use of cold water poured over the body or…held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
- Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet…
- Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family…
- Forced shaving of the head and beard…
- Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest…
As the Red Cross writers tell us, “each specific method was in fact applied in combination with other methods, either simultaneously or in succession.”…
One fact, seemingly incontrovertible, after the descriptions contained and the judgments made in the ICRC report, is that officials of the United States, in interrogating prisoners in the “War on Terror,” have tortured and done so systematically. From many other sources, including the former president himself, we know that the decision to do so was taken at the highest level of the American government and carried out with the full knowledge and support of its most senior officials….