The Central Intelligence Agency -- under President George W. Bush and now President Barack Obama -- has refused to allow the International Red Cross access to tortured detainees captured in the US war on terror, a new human rights report reveals.
The CIA's refusal, caught by veteran Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff and The Public Record, has prevented the group from finding out more information about detainees that were transferred by the Bush Administration after the revelation that they were being held in secret prisons.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former Bush official told Isikoff that the Red Cross has not been informed of the detainees' whereabouts. Nor has the State Department received assurances that the detainees won't be tortured in their home countries where many of them have been transferred to, the official said. The issue is particularly important to human rights groups because of a recently leaked Red Cross report that concluded the US tortured some terrorist suspects captured under the Bush Administration.
"This issue has been hiding in plain sight—but nobody has connected the dots," the former official is quoted as saying.
"The majority of the people in the CIA program are unaccounted for," John Sifton, a human-rights investigator and lawyer told Isikoff. "We don't know what happened to them."
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