NYT : Rules Lay Out C.I.A.’s Tactics in Questioning

Rules Lay Out C.I.A.’s Tactics in Questioning

By MARK MAZZETTI | July 21, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 20 — The White House said Friday that it had given the Central Intelligence Agency approval to resume its use of some severe interrogation methods for questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas.

With the new authority, administration officials said the C.I.A. could proceed with an interrogation program that had been in limbo since the Supreme Court ruled last year that all prisoners in American captivity be treated in accordance with Geneva Convention prohibitions against humiliating and degrading treatment.

A new executive order signed by President Bush does not authorize the full set of harsh interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. since the program began in 2002. But government officials said the rules would still allow some techniques more severe than those used in interrogations by military personnel in places like the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Several officials said the permitted techniques did not include some of the most controversial past techniques, among them “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of drowning, and exposure to extremes of heat and cold.

The basic outcome had been expected, but it was preceded by months of intense disagreement within the administration about where to draw the line on C.I.A. interrogations. The new list of techniques has been approved by the Justice Department as not violating the Geneva strictures, a step that Congress insisted on last October when it passed the Military Commissions Act, which formally authorized the C.I.A. program.

The White House order brought condemnation on Friday from human rights groups, which argued that it helped systematize a program of indefinite, incommunicado detention and used methods that violated international law. But in a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, defended the program as having been “irreplaceable,” though he said extraordinary techniques had been used on fewer than half of about 100 terrorism suspects.

General Hayden said the White House order would allow the agency to “focus on our vital work, confident that our mission and authorities are clearly defined.” The C.I.A. said it had suspended its use of harsh interrogation procedures during the debate over the new rules, even as the White House argued that the agency should be given extra latitude to carry out effective interrogations of terrorism suspects.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he would wait to review the Justice Department’s legal reasoning before he passed judgment. General Hayden briefed the intelligence committees earlier in the year about the agency’s own review.

The specific interrogation methods now approved for C.I.A. use remain classified, but several officials said they did not include waterboarding, which human rights organizations and some members of Congress have said are equal to torture. The C.I.A. acted on its own beginning in 2004 to prohibit some of these measures after their use became publicly known.

In a conference call with reporters on Friday, a senior administration official indicated that another technique now forbidden would be exposure to temperature extremes, and the executive order itself states that detainees must be protected “from extremes of heat and cold.” It is unclear whether sleep deprivation, another technique used in past C.I.A. interrogations, is authorized.

The order uses a definition of “humiliating and degrading treatment” that conforms to standards set by international case law, a victory for State Department officials.

According to the senior administration official, the C.I.A. will bar the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting detainees in agency hands, a prohibition it has enforced in the past.

Earlier this year, State Department officials rejected a draft of the executive order because they believed that the language was too permissive and could open the Bush administration to challenges from American allies that the White House was legalizing methods that approach torture. Some Bush administration officials, including members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, pushed for a more expansive interpretation of Geneva Convention language and for interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had not even requested.

According to one senior intelligence official, nearly half of the source material used in the recent National Intelligence Estimate on the terrorism threat to the United States came from C.I.A. interrogations of detainees.

Some human rights groups said they feared that the Bush administration was using creative legal reasoning to justify practices that close American allies have banned.

“This is an administration that won’t even publicly denounce waterboarding,” said John Sifton, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch. “It’s hard to believe that they will be interpreting these standards in a way that is true to the spirit of the Military Commissions Act.”

But other critics of the harsh C.I.A. interrogation practices of the past, including former top Bush administration officials, said that the executive order was a step in the right direction. “The U.S. government is continuing to move toward an approach to this vital area of human intelligence collection that is more sustainable — morally, politically, and legally,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice until last year and who delivered a blistering lecture earlier this year denouncing the C.I.A.’s interrogation program as it was used in the past.

The executive order applies only to detainees in C.I.A. hands, not to those in military custody. Last September, all 14 prisoners in C.I.A. custody were transferred to the Guantánamo prison and put under Pentagon control, including two senior operatives of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has confessed to being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. It is unclear how many suspects have passed through the program since then, or if the C.I.A has anyone in its prisons. The only prisoner that the C.I.A. has acknowledged holding since last fall is Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd who is believed to have been one of Osama bin Laden’s closest advisers.

C.I.A. officials said that Mr. Iraqi produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that C.I.A. interrogators at the time were authorized to use only the techniques approved for Pentagon interrogators.