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International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (CICR)


Self Description

October 2002: "The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was founded nearly a century and a half ago. It seeks to preserve a measure of humanity in the midst of war. Its guiding principle is that even in war there are limits: limits on how warfare is conducted and limits on how combatants behave. The set of rules that were established with this in mind and endorsed by nearly every nation in the world is known as international humanitarian law, of which the Geneva Conventions are the bedrock....The organization has delegations in some 60 countries around teh world, has activities in more than 80, and employs a staff of around 12,000people. The ICRC is a neutral, impartial and independent humanitarian organization. Its nature and membership are non-governmental."
http://www.icrc.org/WEBGRAPH.NSF/Graphics/discover_eng.pdf/$FILE/discover_eng.pdf (Please click "About the ICRC" for detailed information.)

Third-Party Descriptions

January 2009: "The war, of course, is portrayed differently here and abroad. What Israelis see on the front pages of their newspapers and on their evening broadcasts is not what the rest of the world is reading and seeing. Israeli news focuses on Israeli suffering — the continuing rocket attacks on Israel, the wounded Israeli soldiers with pictures from Gaza coming later. On a day last week when the foreign news media focused on Red Cross allegations of possible war crimes, Israeli news outlets played down the story."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13israel.html

November 2007: "Some German officials had worried that making the records public would lead to a new flood of compensation claims against the government. But under pressure from researchers and Holocaust survivors, Germany last year agreed to open the archives, which are overseen by an 11-nation consortium and the International Committee of the Red Cross."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/24/AR2007112400612.html

October 2007: 'The ICRC remains gravely concerned by the fate of the persons previously held in the CIA detention program who remain unaccounted for,' said Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington. 'The ICRC is concerned about any type of secret detention.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/26/AR2007102602326.html

October 2007: The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html

August 2007: Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was subjected to the CIA's harshest interrogation methods while he was held in secret prisons around the world for more than three years, part of an interrogation regimen that the International Committee of the Red Cross has called 'tantamount to torture,' according to a New Yorker article to be published on the magazine's Web site today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/04/AR2007080401497.html

May 2007: "The Red Cross' access to detainees, set forth in the Geneva Conventions, is premised on the idea that anonymous, secret detentions create conditions conducive to torture.s to the torso complicated by compromised respiration."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/22/cia_prisoner/

Relationships

RoleNameTypeLast Updated
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) International Tracing Service (ITS) Organization Nov 25, 2007
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Jakob Kellenberger Person Sep 5, 2008

Articles and Resources

32 Articles and Resources. Go to:  [Next 12]

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
Jun 15, 2010 Evidence of Plans for Kyrgyz Violence

QUOTE: Violence ebbed on Tuesday and people began emerging from their barricaded homes in Kyrgyzstan’s ethnically torn south, as evidence mounted that days of brutal bloodletting had been deliberately organized to ignite long-running tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks.

 New York Times
Oct 19, 2009 Government Can Supress Torture Evidence...If It Wants

QUOTE: President Obama's May decision to declassify Bush-era legal memos does not require the government to give up more information on techniques revealed by those opinions, a judge ruled last week.

 Atlantic Online, The (Atlantic Monthly)
Aug 13, 2009 Unleashing the laws of war: The Geneva conventions at 60

QUOTE: some inevitably question whether the Geneva conventions and their later protocols are really suited to today’s conflicts.

 Economist
Jul 16, 2009 At Jail in Bagram, A Detainee Protest: Indefinite Incarceration by U.S. at Issue

QUOTE: The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

 Washington Post
Jul 10, 2009 U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died

QUOTE: After a mass killing... of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode...

 New York Times
Jan 15, 2009 Gaza War Generates Debate on Civilians: Questions Reflect Asymmetry of Fight

QUOTE: The Israeli military blames Hamas for using Gazans as human shields and for retreating to densely populated areas to fight the war. But Palestinians and human rights groups say that Israel has been reckless and that in pursuing Hamas, it has employed tactics that unnecessarily drive up the civilian toll.

 Washington Post
Jan 12, 2009 In Israel, a Consensus That Gaza War Is a Just One

QUOTE: “Almost 100 percent of Israelis feel that the world is hypocritical. Where was the world when our cities were rocketed for eight years and our soldier was kidnapped? Why should we care about the world’s view now?”

 New York Times
Aug 20, 2008 NATO, Russia in war of words over Georgia

QUOTE: NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Tuesday that Russian forces were still inside Georgia, despite a European Union-brokered cease-fire agreement to withdraw -- and despite Moscow's saying it had begun pulling out Monday.

 CNN (Cable News Network)
Jun 02, 2008 Hezbollah Hands Over Purported Israeli Remains

QUOTE: Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group based in Lebanon, transferred the remains in a coffinlike container across the Lebanon-Israel border via intermediaries with the International Committee of the Red Cross. At the same time, Israel sent back across the border a Lebanese civilian, Nissim Nasser, 41, who had completed a six-year prison term in Israel for spying for Hezbollah.

 New York Times
Nov 25, 2007 Holocaust Survivors, Heirs Push Old Claims: Germany Long Ago Settled Most Cases, But Many Remain

QUOTE: More than 76,000 claims filed by Jewish families and other Nazi-era victims who had owned property in the former East Germany remain unresolved. About 60,000 Jews who applied for special pensions payable to people the Nazis forced to work for subsistence wages in ghettos were turned down. And owners of stolen artwork complain that efforts to find their collections have been stonewalled by German museums, despite a 1999 pledge to clear up the issue.

 Washington Post
Oct 27, 2007 From CIA Jails, Inmates Fade Into Obscurity: Dozens of 'Ghost Prisoners' Not Publicly Accounted For

QUOTE: Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.

 Washington Post
Oct 04, 2007 Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

QUOTE: But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

 New York Times
Aug 05, 2007 Report: Harsh Methods Used On 9/11 Suspect: Article Details Torture That Mastermind Said He Endured

QUOTE: President Bush last month signed an executive order that requires the CIA to treat detainees humanely, but a classified list of techniques that are approved for the agency's use has been kept from public view.

 Washington Post
Jun 21, 2007 The CIA's torture teachers: Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House.

QUOTE: There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects .... Two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.

 Salon
Apr 01, 2007 Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

QUOTE: But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

 New York Times
Aug 09, 2006 War Crimes Act Changes Would Reduce Threat Of Prosecution

QUOTE: The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments.

 Washington Post
Aug 09, 2006 Muslim Charities Say Fear Is Damming Flow of Money

QUOTE: many people who are inclined to write checks for emergency aid and reconstruction in Lebanon are afraid of ending up in some government database of suspected supporters of terrorism...unintended consequences of the U.S. government's crackdown on charities run by Muslims.

 Washington Post
Jul 28, 2006 UN Committee Criticizes US Human Rights Record

QUOTE: The U.N. Human Rights Committee says the United States should abolish any alleged secret detention facilities and give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to anyone held in connection with armed conflict.
Jun 12, 2006 Postmark Guantanamo: Why is the Pentagon keeping prisoners' mail from their lawyers?

QUOTE: after 18 months in Guantanamo, Paracha, 58, decided to write a letter to 98 U.S. senators describing his plight. The senators...don't know the letters exist. The Department of Defense won't release them for delivery.

 In These Times
May 23, 2006 How Torture Became Mainstream: The once-clandestine practice of torture is now an official weapon in the War on Terror.

QUOTE: over the past 40 years, psychological torture, as practiced by US intelligence community, has proven destructive, elusive, and adaptable. Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, this "no touch" torture is highly destructive of the human psyche, leaving searing psychological scars experts consider more crippling than physical pain. And the lack of visible physical evidence eludes detection, greatly complicating attempts at investigation, prosecution, or prohibition.

 Alternet

32 Articles and Resources. Go to:  [Next 12]