The International Committee of the Red Cross released a report which can be viewed here that is the subject of a review by the New York Book Review. The report sets out the findings of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody. The report is not pretty and it underscores the lawlessness of the Bush/Cheney regime and documents that the Chimperator, Emperor Palpatine Cheney and/or their minions authorized torture techniques once used by the Nazi regime and in the gulags of the former USSR. In reading the report what continued to strike me is that this type of conduct is something condemned by the Gospel message and yet it is the Christianists who to this day continue to back Bush/Cheney and all the crimes that were perpetrated. I can only conclude that despite the self-anointment of these people, they are Christian in name only. Here are some highlights:*
Cheney's story is made not of facts but of the myths that replace them when facts remain secret: myths that are fueled by allusions to a dark world of secrets that cannot be revealed. . . . . To keep the country safe "the gloves had to come off." What precisely were those "gloves" that had to be removed? Laws that forbid torture, that outlaw wiretapping and surveillance without permission of the courts, that limit the president's power to order secret operations and to wage war exactly as he sees fit.
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Working through the forty-three pages of the International Committee of the Red Cross's report, 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." It is hard not to reflect how officials concerned about protecting the country arrived at this particular "alternative set of procedures," and how they convinced themselves, with the help of attorneys in the White House and in the Department of Justice, that these "procedures" were legal.
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The effort began early in the days after the September 11 attacks. . . . on February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention in effect didn't apply to prisoners in the "War on Terror." This decision cleared the way for the adaptation of SERE techniques to interrogation of prisoners in the "War on Terror."
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[I]n interviewing the fourteen "high-value detainees," who had been imprisoned secretly in the "black sites" anywhere from "16 months to almost four and a half years," the Red Cross experts were listening to descriptions of techniques applied to them that had been originally designed to be illegal "under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Conventions." And then the Red Cross investigators, as members of the body designated by the Geneva Conventions to supervise treatment of prisoners of war and to judge that treatment's legality, were called on to pronounce whether or not the techniques conformed to the conventions in the first place. In this judgment, they are, not surprisingly, unequivocal: 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.
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They are also illegal under the Convention Against Torture of 1984, to which the United States is a signatory, and illegal under the War Crimes Act of 1996 (though the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes an attempt to shield those who applied the "alternative set of procedures" from legal consequences under this law). What is more, as the report concludes, The totality of the circumstances in which the fourteen were held effectively amounted to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty and enforced disappearance, in contravention of international law.
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In short, the report is damning and I for one believe that those who ordered torture that violated international law and which constituted war crimes need to be held accountable and tried for their crimes - and that includes Bush and Cheney. The latter is sadly unlikely to happen, but by not holding these individuals liable under international law undercuts the message that was sent at the end of World War II when both Nazi and Japanese officials were tried and punished for war crimes.
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