The Red Cross concluded, based on the "consistency" of the accounts of the detainees in separate interviews, that the prisoners had been subjected to what "amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

But the report documents the treatment of only those 14 high-value CIA detainees whom President Bush publicly announced in September 2006 had been transferred to Guantánamo. Because the Bush administration had a preexisting arrangement to permit the Red Cross access to detainees at Guantánamo, the transfer to the U.S. detention facility in Cuba allowed the organization to question those prisoners for the first time. At the time of the transfer, Bush said the CIA interrogation program had provided valuable intelligence in the war on terror and had taken "potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill." Without offering any numbers, he also said that the CIA detention program had involved "only a limited number of terrorists at any given time." But Bush said the detention program was being ended, adding: "Once we have determined that the terrorists held by the CIA have little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

In fact, agency officials have confirmed that as many as 100 detainees had gone through the detention program after it was created following the 9/11 attacks. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged late last year that 33 of those detainees were subjected to "enhanced interrogation" techniques under the program. As the former Bush official pointed out, "You can do the math"—meaning that most of the detainees in CIA custody (and who were being held in secret sites around the globe) were never sent to Guantánamo. A footnote in the Red Cross report suggests that it inquired about the status of as many as 38 detainees who were in agency custody. The report concludes that the "majority" of these detainees were instead sent back to their countries of origin.

Many of these countries—such as Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Syria—have long been criticized by the U.S. State Department for their human-rights violations, particularly in their treatment of terror suspects. That has only heightened the concerns among human-rights groups about the fate of the prisoners.

"The majority of the people in the CIA program are unaccounted for," said John Sifton, a human-rights investigator and lawyer who has closely monitored the CIA program. "We don't know what happened to them."

The CIA refused to comment on any aspect of the Red Cross report. A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, added, however, that the agency under its new director, Leon Panetta, "has taken decisive steps to ensure that the CIA abides by the president's executive orders," which forbid cruel or inhumane treatment of detainees. Panetta "also has stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished."

© 2009