WASHINGTON - March 16, 2009 – U.S. interrogators attached detainees to collars like dogs and used their leashes to slam them against walls, forced them to stand for days wearing only diapers, and tied detainees’ necks with towels and threw them against plywood walls, according to accounts in a secret 2007 report issued by the Red Cross to be printed in a New York magazine and leaked on Monday.

The report - issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross and kept secret for the last two years - is the first first-hand document to legally say the Bush regime's harsh interrogation techniques "constituted torture." It strongly implies that CIA interrogators violated international law.

The Red Cross was the only organization to get access to high-value detainees that were transferred to Guantanamo Bay from secret U.S. prisons in 2006. It contains accounts from the prisoners, who were held in different locations but offered remarkably uniform tales of abuse at the hands of U.S. agents.

Techniques amounted to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," the report states. Such treatment is explicitly barred by the Geneva Conventions.

The Red Cross report is perhaps the most harrowing to date in describing what appear to be routine U.S. practices authorized by the Bush regime. They include beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, collaring and simulated drowning.

But the report goes further. Prisoners were routinely beaten, stripped, doused with freezing water, subjected to loud music, and kept awake for days with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers.

The report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books.