Torture!

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Americans' interrogation methods have probably destroyed the nation's reputation

It's unlikely that the United States will ever live down the shame of torture during the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration.

It's history now and all the piety and wit of those former U.S. officials responsible for this horrendous chapter cannot wipe out a word of it.

Mark Danner published in the New York Review of Books excerpts of a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on CIA interrogation techniques used at secret U.S. "black site" prisons abroad and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Red Cross report is based on Red Cross interviews in 2006 with 14 "high value" detainees at Guantanamo as part of the ICRC's legally recognized duties to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war, the New York Review of Books said.

Red Cross officials interviewed each of the 14 detainees in private. The report was not intended to be released to the public but was to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them-- the CIA.

The shocking account tells of the sadistic punishment inflicted on prisoners picked up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under CIA control they were brutalized. They were beaten, their heads regularly slammed against walls and subjected to constant loud music. They also were deprived of sleep for days and, of course, there was water boarding -- a torture technique designed to make the victims think that they are drowning.

The Red Cross report noted that the detainees told similar stories of their treatment. Since the detainees were kept "in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention . . . the striking similarity in their stories, even down to small details, would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely, if not impossible."

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