File photo shows demonstrators dressed as Guantanamo prisoners protest against torture at the Los Angeles FarmersÕ market.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Al-Qaeda 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 that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the CIA last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically“ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.
According to “New York Times“, 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 water boarded-- a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

Secret Detentions
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“, offers new details of the agency’s secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al-Qaeda.
Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the US 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 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Pathetic Torture
Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been waterboarded at least 10 times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.
The book also reports that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, told the Red Cross that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that 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 and being forced to stand 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.“

Confirmed
Mayer said that several CIA officers she spoke with confirmed parts of the Red Cross description.
A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, confirmed that Red Cross workers had been “granted access to the detained terrorists at Guantanamo and heard their claims.“ He said the agency’s interrogations were based on “detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice“ and had “produced solid information that has contributed directly to the disruption of terrorist activities.“

The Lebanese army moved on Friday into Bastara Farm, the only one of the occupied Shebaa Farms that the Israeli army evacuated when it pulled out of south Lebanon in 2000, an AFP correspondent said.
Lebanese army vehicles and bulldozers could be seen moving for the first time into the farm, which lies some 300 meters away from other farms which Israel has occupied for more than 40 years.
A road has been reconstructed to link this new position to other Lebanese army posts in the southeast of the country.
The Shebaa Farms, a mountainous sliver of land rich in water resources measuring 25 square kilometers, are located at the junction of southeast Lebanon, southwest Syria and northern Israel.
Israel seized the farms from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war when it occupied the neighboring Golan Heights which it later annexed.

Moscow has refused requests to seek international arbitration over its increasingly tense standoff with Georgia as the government in Tblisi threatened to shoot down any Russian planes that flew over its territory.
Georgia’s ambassador to Russia flew back to Tbilisi on Friday, having been recalled after Russia admitted sending fighters to over fly Georgia’s breakaway republic of South Ossetia on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
The regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, part of Georgia during Soviet times, have been described as “frozen conflicts“ since the early 1990s, when vicious wars left them de facto independent and heavily dependent on Russian support.
But in the past months, the frozen conflicts have been thawing quickly, as both sides accuse the other of provocation and the threat of renewed conflict looms.
Georgia has accused Russia of several incursions into its airspace in the past few months, including an incident where an unmanned Georgian spy drone was shot down over Abkhazia, but Russia has always denied its planes were involved. This week’s incident was the first time Russia admitted an incursion.

Israeli police accused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of fraud on Friday and said an investigation into alleged bribe-taking had been widened to look at whether he made duplicate claims for travel expenses.
According to Reuters, police and prosecutors said they asked the Israeli leader during questioning on Friday to “give his account about suspicions of serious fraud and other offences“, which involved him billing different public bodies for the same trips abroad.
Police questioned Olmert for the third time on Friday as part of an investigation into allegations he took bribes from American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky. Olmert has said he did nothing wrong in his dealings with the New York fundraiser but has promised to step down if formally charged in the case.
The investigation could hamper US-backed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians if Olmert is forced to quit.
“According to the suspicions, during his tenure as Beit-ul-Mogaddas mayor and trade and industry minister, Olmert would seek duplicate funding for his trips abroad from public bodies, including from the state, with each of them requested to fund the same trip,“ the statement from police and prosecutors said.

Russia and China vetoed proposed sanctions on Zimbabwe Friday, rejecting US efforts to step up punitive measures against its authoritarian regime linked to a rash of violence surrounding a disputed presidential election.
Western powers mustered nine votes, the minimum needed to gain approval in the 15-nation council. But the resolution failed because of the action by two of the five veto-wielding members, AP reported.
The other three members with veto power, the US, Britain and France, argued sanctions were needed to respond to the violence and intimidation linked to Zimbabwe’s recent and widely discredited presidential election.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said sanctions would have taken the UN beyond its mandate to deal with threats to international peace and security.
The United States, having earlier in the week mustered the nine votes needed to pass the sanctions, stalled on bringing the resolution to a vote until it became absolutely clear that Russia was determined to stop it.