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."

In addition to the coercive methods -- which the ICRC said "amounted to torture" and a violation of U.S. and international treaty obligations -- the report says detainees were routinely threatened with further violence against themselves and their families. Nine of the 14 detainees said they were threatened with "electric shocks, infection with HIV, sodomy of the detainee and . . . being brought close to death," the report said.

The ICRC report was based on accounts made separately to agency investigators by individual detainees, all of whom had been kept in isolation before the interviews, the document states. CIA officials have confirmed that three of the detainees were subjected to waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

The CIA had no immediate comment on the report. Previously, top Bush administration officials defended the interrogation methods, saying they were legal and necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. A U.S. official, commenting on a leak of portions of the report in March, said: "It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves."

The report can be accessed at http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf.