SECRET RED CROSS REPORT SAYS THE CIA TORTURED AL QAEDA DETAINEES

Progress Report | “Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level al Qaeda prisoners constituted torture,” according to a new book by investigative reporter Jane Mayer.

The report found that the Bush administration “may have committed ‘grave breaches’ of the Geneva Conventions” and that the officials who approved the methods could be “guilty of war crimes.” The report, which Mayer cited in less detail last year in the New Yorker, says that al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross “that he had been waterboarded at least 10 times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.”

Abu Zubaydah also was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was “one of several prisoners to be ’slammed against the walls.’” The Red Cross concluded that the methods used on Zubaydah were “categorically” torture. In August 2007, after Mayer’s initial New Yorker article on the report was published, President Bush replied, “[I] haven’t seen it; we don’t torture” when asked about the report. But according to Mayer’s book, the CIA showed the report to both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

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