CIA Program: Reckless or Tightly Governed?

The report detailing the CIA's secret interrogation program shows the detention of terror suspects was governed by a strictly kept set of rules, a New York Times analysis finds.

While most of the attention rests on reports of interrogators' possibly criminal techniques, such as mock executions and an inmate's family, the report reveals a tightly regulated system that proponents say was designed to keep the program safe and legal.

But critics say the newly released documents only show that the pattern of reckless disregard for human rights extended well beyond low-level interrogators into the upper reaches of the Bush administration.

According to the documents, doctors and lawyers were highly involved with setting up the program's parameters and monitored prisoner treatment throughout, including interrogation sessions. Rules governed how time detainees could be exposed to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, from enforced nudity to waterboarding.

The prisoner treatment at secret detention facilities began with putting them in diapers, shaving their heads and face, stripping and photographing them before starting a sleep deprivation program.

Read more about the CIA secret interrogation program:

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The documents show interrogations were supposed to begin with the "least coercive" measures before moving on to harsher treatment, which culminated in waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

Throughout the program, lawyers in the Justice Department and White House counsel's office kept close tabs, receiving psychological reports on inmates and refining guidelines for interrogation techniques.

Now, current Attorney General Eric Holder is considering whether to prosecute interrogators who overstepped the bounds and engaged in what is now regarded as torture.

Proponents of the program say the tightly controlled practices show the program wasn't a haphazard effort at interrogation.

"Elaborate care went into figuring out the precise gradations of coercion," David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer for both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations told the New York Times. "Yes, it's jarring. But it shows how both the lawyers and the nonlawyers tried to do the right thing."

But critics say they only prove how endemic the disregard for human rights was.

"They show how deeply rooted this new culture of mistreatment became," Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International, told the Times.