But Obama appeared to leave an opening for the CIA to again have expanded authorities. The order calls for the creation of a special task force, headed by the U.S. attorney general to study whether the Army field manual is adequate and to recommend "additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies."
Administration officials stressed that there was no intent to create a loop-hole.
"This is not a secret annex that allows us to bring the enhanced interrogation techniques back," said a senior Obama administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing legal strategies. "It's not."
But the language left the impression that the Obama team could later decide to adopt separate standards for the military and the CIA, and that any additional methods approved for the agency would remain classified.
Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Obama's nominee to serve as the next director of national intelligence, testified yesterday that the government would withhold specifics from any new interrogation document for fear that "we not turn our manual into a training manual for our adversaries."
In testimony during his confirmation hearing, Blair declined to say whether he thought the interrogation technique known as water-boarding - in which a prisoner is doused with water to create the sensation of drowning - was torture.
When pressed on the issue, Blair said he did not want to "put in jeopardy" CIA officers who had employed the method. Asked whether CIA interrogations had been effective, Blair said, "I'll have to look into that more closely."
Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he found Blair's responses "troubling." Even so, Blair is expected to be confirmed for the position, and vowed to prohibit coercive methods.
"There will be no water-boarding on my watch," Blair said. "No torture on my watch."
In a separate order yesterday, Obama instructed the CIA to close its constellation of secret prisons overseas, facilities that previously held some of the most notorious detainees in U.S. custody, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The secret CIA prisons were set up in 2002, but were rarely used after 2006, when a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court prompted President Bush to order 14 prisoners still in agency custody to be transferred to Guantanamo. Since then, only two prisoners were held at CIA facilities for short periods before being sent to Guantanamo.
The order raises the question of what the CIA will do with terrorism suspects captured overseas if it does not wish to bring them to U.S. courts.
The new Obama orders did not ban the controversial CIA practice of rendition, in which prisoners are transferred by the CIA from one country to another.
Those transfers can continue, according to the orders, as long as prisoners are not taken to other nations "to face torture" or as part of a CIA effort to circumvent international laws on detainee treatment.
