US President George W. Bush on Friday forbade the CIA from torturing suspected terrorists in its once-secret detention and interrogation program but was criticized for his vague, "trust us" approach.
Human rights groups said the executive order left out critical details, such as controversial tactics that administration officials often describe as "enhanced interrogation techniques."
The order says that the detention program, whose existence was confirmed last September, must abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on wartime detainees and requires the CIA director to enforce that standard.
It lists no specific practices that are affected, or punishments for violations, and does not describe in any further detail a secret CIA prison network that has drawn outrage from US allies in Europe.
Bush spokesman Tony Snow said the order barred "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" and "acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation and cruel and inhuman treatment."
"It also prohibits `willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts beyond the bounds of human decency,'" he said.
"And the order forbids acts intended to denigrate detainees' religion, religious practices or religious objects," Snow said.
However, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) slammed the order as "contrary to the Geneva Conventions" because it essentially affirmed CIA secret detentions, a program that is "illegal to its core," it said in a statement.
"The key aspect of this is all the parts that aren't said," said Jennifer Daskal, HRW senior counterterrorism counsel, who charged that the order allowed "a system of incommunicado detention to continue, with the blessing of the president."
"What we have here is an administration basically reciting a number of legal principles and saying `trust us.' And that's hard to take from an administration that refuses to renounce waterboarding," she said.
On a White House-organized conference call -- organized on the condition that the briefer not be named -- one senior Bush aide refused to discuss whether any detention or interrogation practices, or how many detainees, were affected.
He refused to discuss specifically the order's impact on "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is tied down and water is poured over the face or over a cloth stretched over the face, producing the sensation of drowning.
The aide also sidestepped a question about why sleep was not included in a section explicitly granting detainees "the basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care."
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