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

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

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.

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