Secret report accuses CIA of torture, book says

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the CIA's interrogation methods for high-level al-Qaida prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says the International Committee for the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the CIA last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major al-Qaida figure the United States captured, were "categorically" torture, which is illegal under both U.S. and international law.

The book says Abu Zubaydah 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," according to the Red Cross report. The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

The book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, is to be published next week.

Citing unnamed "sources familiar with the report," Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document "warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted." Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the CIA conducted interrogations but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the CIA shared the report, which Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The book also reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told the Red Cross he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed he had been "kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room."

The report says the prisoners considered the "most excruciating" of the methods being shackled to the ceiling for as long as eight hours. Eleven of the 14 prisoners reported prolonged sleep deprivation, the book says, including "bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day."

"The Dark Side" also describes a frightening false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001, when, it says, an alarm went off on a machine designed to detect biological, chemical or radiologic attacks. Among those who believed they might have been exposed to a pathogen was Vice President Dick Cheney.

Sept. 11 suspects

complain to judge

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Facing the death penalty for their roles in the Sept. 11 attacks, self-described mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and an accused accomplice told a judge Thursday the military-commission process is so dysfunctional they cannot file legal motions or have pretrial documents translated into their native languages.

In separate hearings, Mohammed, Waleed bin Attash and legal advisers ticked off examples of a pretrial system they say is barely operating.

"We are not in normal situation. We are in hell," Mohammed told the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann.

Mohammed and bin Attash were permitted to act as their own lawyers in the case, in which they and three other men face a host of charges in connection with the 2001 attacks. That means they are entitled to file legal motions and have access to much of the evidence — just like the Justice Department and military prosecutors seeking to convict them — according to officials from the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, which is overseeing the controversial and unprecedented trials.

Kohlmann acknowledged he never received motions each of them had written by hand in their detention cells, or other communications the men wanted the judge to see.

Recent court filings and other communications by prosecutors and the judge himself were either never delivered to Mohammed and bin Attash, or they were sent in English and not in Arabic or in Pashtun, Mohammed's native language.

Bin Attash, accused of helping obtain false passports for the hijackers, said he received one important six-page filing by prosecutors that had been translated into Arabic, but he got it Thursday morning — nine days after it was filed.

Kohlmann appeared taken aback by the assertions and promised to look into them if the suspects filed motions requesting him to do so.

Kohlmann also delayed a pretrial hearing for accused Sept. 11 terror plotter Ramzi Binalshibh until after he was mentally evaluated, the U.S. Defense Department said. Defense lawyers had requested the examination after learning Binalshibh was taking psychotropic drugs for an undisclosed mental condition. The lawyers said Binalshibh, at a June 5 hearing, said he was forced to take drugs.

Additional material from the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News.