Medical Officers Violated Ethics While Overseeing Interrogations, Red Cross Says

By Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, April 6, 2009

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, according a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda captives were deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency found in a 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site tonight. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."

The new details about alleged CIA interrogation practices were contained in a 43-page volume written by ICRC officials who were given unprecedented access to the CIA's "high-value detainees" in late 2006. While excerpts of the report were leaked previously, the entire document was made public for the first time tonight by author Mark Danner, a journalism professor, on the Web site of the New York Review of Books.

The confidential report sheds additional light on the CIA's handling of the detainees, who were detained in secret overseas prisons for up to four years and subjected to what the agency describes as "enhanced interrogation techniques." In addition to widely reported methods such as waterboarding, the report alleges that several of the detainees were forced to stand for days in painful positions with their arms shackled overhead. One detainee reported being shackled in this manner for "two to three months, seven days of prolonged stress standing followed by two days of being able to sit or lie down."

(More here.)