An undated handout photo of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, a Canadian, taken before he was imprisoned in 2002 at the age of 15. Senator and Ret.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire is urging president-elect Barack Obama to release Omar Khadr to Canada and recognize that his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay has been a human rights violation. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

WASHINGTON – The tales are horrifyingly medieval in nature – terror suspects beaten, bound and bleeding, forced into coffin-like boxes, shackled naked to their beds in darkened cells, deprived of food for weeks, forced underwater to the point of near-drowning, ordered to stand for days.

But the macabre accounts of torture aren’t emerging from totalitarian dictatorships or Dark Ages gallows – this was the 21st century CIA, with the full knowledge of senior officials in George W. Bush’s administration, according to a secret Red Cross report.

The 43-page report from February 2007 is based on interviews with detainees at the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, which still houses Canadian terror suspect Omar Khadr.

The report was obtained by journalist Mark Danner, whose article, “U.S. Torture: Voices From The Black Sites,” was published Monday in the New York Review of Books.

The Red Cross declined to comment and denied leaking the report.

In the report, the Red Cross says the prisoner accounts constitute repeated violations of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The organization is the appointed legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and oversees the treatment of prisoners of war.

It comes just a day after former vice-president Dick Cheney appeared on CNN to say President Barack Obama’s reversal of the Bush policies was putting the United States in danger.

The torture of terror suspects was “absolutely essential” to gathering life-saving information in the aftermath of Sept. 11, Cheney said.

Not so, according to one of the high-profile prisoners interviewed by the Red Cross.

“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,” Khaled Shaik Mohammed was quoted as saying. “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 U.S.”

Mohammed, whose name is also spelled as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11 attacks. He has publicly accused his captors of torture and remained defiant during proceedings against him at Guantanamo early this year.

The leaked report has prompted renewed calls for Cheney and Bush to be charged with war crimes.

“Bush and Cheney were, in fact, more brutal in their ‘enhanced interrogation’ than the Gestapo was,” Andrew Sullivan wrote Monday on The Atlantic website.

“When the U.S. captured officials who had done to prisoners exactly what the last president did, the U.S. prosecuted them, found them guilty and executed them. The price Cheney pays is a fawning interview on CNN.”

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Tags: Bush Administration, CIA, Dick Cheney, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Omar Khadr, Red Cross, Torture

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