MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. The report on torture in CIA secret prisons is another proof that the US authorities have systematically violated human rights, Russia’s human rights ombudsman Konstantin Dolgov said on Thursday.
“This situation is in contradiction with the claims of the US is an ‘example of democracy.’ This is far away from reality,” Dolgov said in a statement published on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.
The diplomat said Moscow has studied the 528-page report by Senate Intelligence Committee, released on Tuesday, which detailed the CIA use of torture during the interrogation of terrorism suspects in the years following the 9/11 attacks on the US.
The content of the document, which is actually a summary of a classified 6,700-page report, is “shocking,” Dolgov said. “And it’s common knowledge, that this material has been already edited by the Barack Obama Administration.”
The techniques used against the detainees described in the report include sleep deprivation for 180 hours, ice water baths, keeping them in rooms with loud music and walling (slamming a person against a wall), as well as rectal feeding and threatening with harming families.
“During the interrogation, they widely used waterboarding and other cruel methods of obtaining evidence, including frequently from innocent people,” he said.
“This dark page of history has not been yet closed in conditions when the special Guantanamo prison continues functioning, where many inmates have been held for 13 years already without any charges and court rulings, and sometimes new tragic episodes re-emerge,” Dolgov stressed.
Moscow calls on the international community and human rights organizations to demand that Washington should disclose all the truth about violations committed as part of the “global war on terror” and bring those guilty to justice, the diplomat said.