"Physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation," said Priscilla Ray, chairman of the AMA's committee on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA), "because a role as physician-interrogator undermines the physician's role as a healer and thereby erodes trust in the individual physician interrogator and in the medical profession." The new provision could be voted as early as Monday, making it the newest AMA policy.

Ray outlined the CEJA report during testimony before a special committee of the AMA's House of Delegates, at its annual meeting in Chicago.

The ethics report also said that:

--Doctors cannot monitor the interrogations with the intent of intervening because that constitutes participation.

--Doctors can perform physical and mental assessments of detainees, but are obliged to tell the prisoner that the information obtained will be available to the interrogators.

--Treatment can never be conditional on a patient's participation in an interrogation.

--Physicians may participate in developing effective interrogation strategies, but these strategies cannot threaten or cause physical injury or mental suffering, and must respect the rights of individuals.

--If physicians believe that interrogations are coercive, they must report their observations to appropriate authorities, and if those authorities do not intervene, physicians are obligated to report their concerns to independent authorities.

"This report provides valuable ethical guidance which is consistent with our commitment as military physicians to the practice of ethical medicine and to the defense of our great nation," said Air Force Surgeon General George Taylor Jr.

Taylor, a delegate to the House of Delegates representing the Air Force, said, "We support the report from CEJA."

However, Stephen Xenakis, a former brigadier general of the United States Army, representing the Physicians for Human Rights, said the CEJA report need further revision to remove "ambiguities." "There are still some loopholes in that report," Xenakis told United Press International.

Xenakis, who spent 28 years in the Army, said that if there is loophole, the military will take advantage of it.

While he said that the CEJA report was a "step in the right direction," he added he would lobby for additional work on the document that would assure that physicians would be ethically bound not to participate in any way with prisoner interrogation.

The report comes at a time when allegations of coercive interrogations, prisoner suicides and prisoner abuse by U.S. forces detaining Iraqi and Afghani prisoners continue to bubble to the surface.

David Fasler, a Burlington, Vt., child psychiatrist who requested the report in 2005, said he was pleased with the outcome. "This report is clear and consistent with the AMA's ethical principles. We are making a number of important statements: Physicians should not design, participate in or monitor the interrogations of prisoners or detainees. Such activities are simply incompatible with our primary obligation to 'do no harm'."

He noted that the AMA's position mirrors a recently adopted declaration by the American Psychiatric Association so that "organized medicine speaks with one voice on this issue."

The committee that heard the testimony Sunday will consider the discussion and then report to the full House of Delegates whether the report should be accepted. The committee, headed by Joseph Reichman, a plastic surgeon from Vorhees, N.J., could also reject the report or could recommend that it be sent back to CEJA for further clarifications.

The House of Delegates has the same options available to it when it votes on the proposal. The annual meeting concludes Wednesday.

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