Red Cross calls CIA prisons ‘inhuman’

WASHINGTON — 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, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the program “inhuman.”

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected Al Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”

New details about alleged CIA practices were contained in the 43-page volume written by ICRC officials who were given unprecedented access to the CIA’s “high-value detainees” in late 2006. Excerpts of the report were leaked previously, but the entire document was made public for the first time Monday by Mark Danner, a journalism professor at UC Berkeley, on the website of the New York Review of Books.

The detainees were held in secret overseas prisons for up to four years and subjected to what the CIA describes as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In addition to widely reported methods such as waterboarding -- simulated drowning -- the report alleges several of the detainees were forced to stand for days in painful positions with their arms shackled overhead.

An ICRC spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the document and said the organization “deplores that what was to be a confidential report has been made public.”

The CIA declined to comment on the report but noted that the agency has ended the interrogation program.