So the Bush Administration continues to fight for indefinite imprisonment without charges being brought, and now has given the green light to the CIA to resume torture in the secret prisons. This is the same president who vigorously criticized Russia for such practices. (See this Greenwald column.) Here’s how it works:

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.

…  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.

… 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.

More at the link.