US admits to waterboarding
WASHINGTON In congressional testimony Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden
became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge
the agency used waterboarding on detainees following the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks.
Waterboarding involves strapping a suspect down and pouring
water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of
drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish
Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world.
"We used it against these three detainees because of the
circumstances at the time," Hayden told the Senate Intelligence
Committee. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic
attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited
knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have
changed."
Hayden said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim
al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the
technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director Mike
McConnell told senators during the same hearing Tuesday that
waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal - so long as it as the
specific consent of the president and legal approval of the
attorney general.
That prompted Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to call on the Justice
Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of
waterboarding violated any law. The Pentagon has banned its
employees from using waterboarding to extract information from
detainees, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators
do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects.
Durbin, already frustrated with Attorney General Michael
Mukasey's refusal last week to define waterboarding a form of
torture as critics have, said he would block the nomination of the
Justice Department's No. 2 official if the criminal inquiry isn't
opened.
It was a particularly sharp threat by Durbin, who represents
Illinois - the same state that U.S. District Judge Mark Filip of
Chicago, the deputy attorney general nominee, calls home.
"In light of the Justice Department's continued
non-responsiveness to Congress on the issue of torture, including
your disappointing testimony on waterboarding last week, I have
reluctantly concluded that placing a hold on Judge Filip's
nomination is my only recourse for eliciting timely and complete
responses to important questions on torture," Durbin wrote in a
letter to Mukasey on Tuesday.
He added: "A Justice Department investigation should explore
whether waterboarding was authorized and whether those who
authorized it violated the law."
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse declined to
comment except to say that the department "is reviewing the letter
carefully."
The delay in confirming Filip could leave the Justice Department
in leadership limbo following a year of internal upheaval and
scandal, Mukasey, sworn in as attorney general in November, has
made rebuilding the department a top priority for the final 11
months of the Bush administration.
Human Rights Watch, which has been calling on the government to
outlaw waterboarding as a form of illegal torture, called Hayden's
testimony "an explicit admission of criminal activity."
Joanne Mariner, the group's counterterrorism director, said
Hayden's tesitimony "gives the lie" to the administration's
claims that the CIA has not used torture. "Waterboarding is
torture, and torture is a crime," she said.
Critics say waterboarding has been outlawed under the U.N.'s
Convention Against Torture, which prohibits treatment resulting in
long-term physical or mental damage. They also say it should be
recognized as banned under the U.S. 2006 Military Commissions Act,
which prohibits treatment of terror suspects that is described as
"cruel, inhuman and degrading." The act, however, does not
explicitly prohibit waterboarding by name.
During his own Senate appearance last week, Mukasey refused to
declare waterboarding illegal, prompting Democrats to accuse him of
potentially allowing the harsh interrogation tactic to be used in
the future.
The attorney general said then he has reviewed Justice
Department memos about the CIA's interrogation program and
concluded that the spy agency doesn't currently engage in
waterboarding. Beyond that, Mukasey would not discuss the legality
of the classified program for fear of what he described as tipping
off U.S. enemies about interrogation methods.
The Justice Department has long resisted exposing the Bush
administration and its employees to criminal or civil charges or
even international war crimes waterboarding is declared illegal.
Hayden said interrogations have been conducted by both intelligence
agents and government contractors interrogators but denied that the
practice, as he described it, has been outsourced.
"This is a governmental activity under governmental direction
and control in which the participant may be both government
employees and contractors," he said in an exchange with Democratic
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
McConnell, the nation's spy chief, said in Tuesday's testimony
that waterboarding "taken to its extreme, could be death; you
could drown someone." But he, too, refused to declare it illegal
in hypothetical cases.
"Everything I know is it is a legal technique used in a
specific set of circumstances," McConnell said. "You have to know
the circumstances to make a legal judgment," McConnell said.
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Associated Press writer Pamela Hess contributed to this report.