Update: The actual Red Cross Report has been made available.  Here it is.

On April 9, 2002, an article by Mark Danner appeared on the New York Review of Books website that summarized the the findings of a Red Cross investigation into torture allegation by the US.  Among other things, the article described the treatment of Abu Zubayda and thirteen other "high-value" detainees.  Their stories are remarkably similar. 

The story that I found most interesting, however, was Zubayda's.  He was detained after a bloody firefight, in which he almost lost his life.  After US officials captured him, it took a miracle of modern medicine to keep him alive.  Several days after he was captured and nursed back to health, he found himself in a US detention center.  

According to the report, Zubayda was kept shackled by the hands and feet to a chair for two to three weeks upon his arrest.  The only time he was allowed to move was when we went to the toilet, which was a bucket in the corner of his cell.  Loud music was played 24 hours a day and if he well asleep, the guards poured water on his face to keep him awake.  The only time the music stopped was when he was interrogated by US officials.  Danner notes that these "techniques" can be easily called "sleep-depravation" or "stress-inducement".

Two and a half months after he was arrested, the interrogations became more and more severe.  His captors tied a towel around his neck that they used to swing him against a wall.  The walls were reinforced with plywood so as to provide a little bounce upon impact. 

Apparently, these techniques were ones that were already approved of before the torture memorandum of 2002.  When the green light was given for techniques that would induce pain up to the level of "organ-failure, or death," Zubayda's interrogation got worse.  Zubayda describes these "alternative interrogation procedures" thusly:

I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

Another of the high-value detainees, Khaled Shaik Mohammed, describes his interrogation in vivid detail:

On one occasion during the interrogation I was offered water to drink, when I refused I was again taken to another room where I was made to lie [on] the floor with three persons holding me down. A tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside. Afterwards I wanted to go to the toilet as I had a feeling as if I had diarrhoea. No toilet access was provided until four hours later when I was given a bucket to use.

Whenever I was returned to my cell I was always kept in the standing position with my hands cuffed and chained to a bar above my head.

On another occasion,  Khaled Shaik Mohammed says that his CIA interrogators told him that they had the "green light from Washington" to give him a "hard time."  He says they never used the word torture, but they said that the proceedures they would use were designed to take him to the verge of death and back again.  Indeed, this is exactly what they did.  Doctors were assigned to his interrogations to make sure that he would not die.  They would stop the interrogations in order to nurse him back to health before proceeding.

I am sure by now that the attentive reader of this article knows where this is going.  But in Muhammed's own words,

I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.... I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent...wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.

 This is a wonderful article and I urge you all to read it.