The Nightmare Redux

Red Cross report says detainees at CIA 'black sites' were tortured

The confidential report, published Sunday, could bolster calls for legal action against the Bush administration.

By Jonathan Adams

posted March 16, 2009 at 10:35 am EST

•A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concluded in 2007 that US methods to extract information from prisoners at secret CIA jails as part of the "war on terror" amounted to torture, according to excerpts from a confidential report published on the website of the The New York Review of Books on Sunday.

With US President Barack Obama on record as backing the prosecution of officials involved in "clear instances of wrongdoing," the report could fuel calls for such legal action.

Though allegations of the torture of terror suspects at CIA-run "black sites" have been widely detailed before, the Red Cross report has "an unusual claim to authenticity," the article's author, Mark Danner, wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

The article in the Times quoted the report's conclusion:

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 CIA 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.

The International Committee of the Red Cross interviewed detainees in late 2006 after they had been moved to the US detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The report was not for public release, but for top CIA and other US government officials' eyes only. It was given to them in February 2007 and labeled "confidential."

The Review article ended by noting that many human rights advocates "urge investigations and prosecutions" of Bush officials who adopted the antiterror methods alleged in the Red Cross report.

President Obama, while declaring that "nobody's above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing ... people should be prosecuted," has also expressed his strong preference for "looking forward" rather than "looking backwards."

A book on the war on terror, published last year, mentioned the Red Cross report, but relied on "sources familiar with the report." The New York Times last year quoted from the book, Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side," which said that "the Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the US government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

The New York Review of Books did not say how it obtained a copy of the report.

According to The Washington Post, Red Cross policy prevented it from the making the report public.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group's strict policy of neutrality in conflicts.

The Post added that the accounts that the 14 detainees gave to the Red Cross were "remarkably uniform" and included reports of "beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures. and, in some cases, waterboarding or simulating drowning."

"Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions," the Post wrote.

The Post reports that the CIA declined to comment on the Red Cross report, but quoted a "US official familiar with the report" as saying: "It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves."

The Post also reported reaction from the Red Cross:

ICRC officials did not dispute the authenticity of the excerpts, but a spokesman expressed dismay over the leak of the material. "We regret information attributed to the ICRC report was made public in this manner," spokesman Bernard Barrett said.

"The ICRC has been visiting the detainees formerly held by the CIA," he added, "at Guantánamo since 2006. Any concerns or observations the ICRC had when visiting the detainees are part of a confidential dialogue."

The Red Cross report has surfaced just as former US Vice President Dick Cheney is publicly criticizing President Obama's terror policies for making the US less safe, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

The Red Cross report's conclusion appears to directly contradict former US President George W. Bush's claim that the methods used against terror suspects were permissible under international law, Reuters reports:

Former U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the use of coercive interrogation tactics on senior al-Qaeda captives detained by the CIA in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Bush certified in 2007 that the CIA's interrogation program complied with the Geneva Conventions.

The anti-terrorism policies of the Bush administration drew worldwide condemnation as violations of human rights and international law.

As this Cox & Forkum political cartoon shows, however, some in the US ridiculed the idea of providing legal or humanitarian protection for terror suspects.

NPR interviewed Mr. Danner about his article on Sunday's "All Things Considered" program. (Listen to the report here.)

Find this article at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0316/p99s01-duts.html

The Devil Wins Again

Bush was interrupted by applause as he said, "In a world where some treat life as something to be debased and discarded, we need your message that all human life is sacred and that each of us is willed."

Court upholds lethal injection

The 7-to-2 ruling is expected to end a de facto moratorium on executions nationwide.
By Warren Richey Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the April 17, 2008 edition

Washington - Lethal-injection procedures in Kentucky do not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In a 7-to-2 decision announced on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court upheld the injection procedures used by Kentucky officials to execute condemned prisoners. The majority justices ruled that the existing procedures do not pose a "substantial risk of serious harm."
The action opens the way for an end to a de facto national moratorium on lethal injection executions that has been in place since the fall.
In deciding the case, Baze v. Rees, the high court established a new, more rigorous constitutional test of execution methods under the Eighth Amendment. But the justices declined to embrace a significantly stricter constitutional test that lawyers for death-row inmate Ralph Baze had urged.
They had asked the high court to invalidate Kentucky's three-drug lethal injection protocol because, they said, it posed an unnecessary risk that Mr. Baze would endure an unacceptable level of pain and suffering.
In rejecting that standard, the majority justices said there is no Eighth Amendment requirement that a government-sanctioned execution be pain-free. The Eighth Amendment requires that an execution procedure not involve "a 'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm," writes Chief Justice John Roberts in the court's main opinion.
"A stay of execution may not be granted on grounds such as those asserted here unless the condemned prisoner establishes that the state's lethal injection protocol creates a demonstrated risk of severe pain," Chief Justice Roberts writes. "He must show that the risk is substantial when compared to the known and available alternatives."
Roberts adds: "A state with a lethal injection protocol substantially similar to the protocol we uphold today would not create a risk that meets this standard."
The plurality opinion, written by Roberts, was joined in full by only two other justices, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito. Justice John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Stephen Breyer concurred in the judgment only.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter filed a dissent. Justice Ginsburg said she would have remanded the case to the lower courts with instructions to consider whether the failure to include available safeguards in execution procedures creates an "untoward, readily avoidable risk of inflicting severe and unnecessary pain."
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by lawyers for Baze and a second death-row inmate, Thomas Bowling. The lawyers maintained that the lethal injection protocol used by Kentucky and other states involved too high a risk that personnel might botch the procedure and cause the condemned inmate to experience excruciating pain.
Thirty-six states and the federal government use lethal injection as the preferred method of execution.
Twenty states and the federal government filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the Supreme Court to uphold Kentucky's lethal-injection program. Opponents of the death penalty urged the high court to set a high standard to reduce the risk of the kinds of botched executions that have taken place in several states. They said Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol did not meet minimal standards used to euthanize dogs and cats.
At the heart of the Baze case was a hypothetical scenario vividly portraying what Baze might experience if the execution protocol was not followed precisely.
Under the three-drug protocol used in Kentucky, the first drug administered is a barbiturate that is intended to render the inmate unconscious. Next, the inmate receives a dose of a drug that causes total paralysis. Finally, potassium chloride is injected to stop the heart.
The concern is that if the first drug fails to work properly the inmate will remain mentally aware as the other drugs are injected. Medical experts agree that a condemned inmate will endure unbearable pain and suffering from the injection of the potassium chloride. But because he has just been paralyzed by the second drug, the inmate will be unable to show any sign of distress. To an observer, the inmate may appear to have gone peacefully to sleep. But some experts say the inmate may, in fact, be fully conscious and in agony during his final moments of life.
At least two states, Missouri and Florida, have taken steps to prevent this scenario by requiring verification that the inmate is unconscious prior to the administration of the other two drugs. Critics say properly trained medical professionals are needed to ensure the procedure is as pain-free as possible. But ethics codes bar medical professionals from participating in executions.
In his plurality opinion, Roberts said Kentucky had established a number of safeguards to prevent botched executions. They included requiring members of the injection team to have at least one year of professional experience as a certified medical assistant or paramedic. In addition, the state requires the warden and deputy warden to be present in the execution chamber and available to watch for problems.
"In light of these safeguards, we cannot say that the risks identified by [the inmates] are so substantial or imminent as to amount to an Eighth Amendment violation," Roberts writes.
"Much of [the inmates'] case rests on the contention that they have identified a significant risk of harm that can be eliminated by adopting alternative procedures," he writes. But the Eighth Amendment does not require the invalidation of execution methods whenever a slightly or marginally safer alternative is identified.
"Permitting an Eighth Amendment violation to be established on such a showing would threaten to transform courts into boards of inquiry charged with determining 'best practices' for executions," the chief justice writes.
In his concurrence, Justice Stevens says he supported the plurality result because it was in line with Supreme Court precedent. But he urged his fellow justices – and the nation – to begin a reexamination of the death penalty."The time for dispassionate, impartial comparison of the enormous costs that death-penalty litigation imposes on society with the benefits that it produces has surely arrived," he writes.
Justice Stevens said he believes the high court's decision in the Kentucky case will spark further litigation. "Instead of ending the controversy, I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol," Stevens writes, "but also about the justification for the death penalty itself."



Find this article at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0417/p01s06-usju.html