red cross

Reports today that the U.S. military is calling for an overhaul of the Bagram prison in Afghanistan follow weeks of little-reported protests by prisoners there, who since July 1 have refused to leave their cells or participate in video-phone calls with family members, all to protest their indefinite detention, says the International Committee of the [...]

For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books piece.) The first annex to the [...]

Don’t miss Dafna Linzer’s ProPublica report — following up on her post last week about an inadvertently acknowledged secret CIA detainee — on so-called “ghost detainees” believed to held by the CIA but unreported to, say, the Red Cross. If another country did this, we’d probably call these detainees “disappeared,” with all the ugly implications [...]

Yup, that’s what Jane Mayer told Alternet’s Liliana Segura: the Defense Department actually hid prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross when the humanitarian group first visited the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in 2002.
“That’s an overt act; lying to the Red Cross, hiding prisoners from them,” Mayer said.
The ICRC is [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s letter to his employees: Panetta’s statement that CIA officers “should not be investigated, let alone punished,” because this “is what fairness and wisdom require,” is not surprising. But it may not be all that wise, either.

Sen. Barack Obama is tapping his sizable political cell phone network to help Hurricane Gustav relief. On Monday, he issued a personal plea via text message to his supporters:
Barack asks that you give to the Red Cross…
The short message encouraged supporters to give money online, by calling an 800 number, or, in a first for [...]