WASHINGTON, Jan 19: The first secretary of the Homeland Security Department says waterboarding, formerly used by the CIA to interrogate terror suspects, is torture.

“There’s just no doubt in my mind, under any set of rules, waterboarding is torture,” Tom Ridge said on Friday in an interview. Ridge had offered the same opinion earlier in the day to members of the American Bar Association at a homeland security conference.

“One of America’s greatest strengths is the soft power of our value system and how we treat prisoners of war, and we don’t torture,” Ridge said in the interview. Ridge was secretary of the Homeland Security Department between 2003 and 2005. “And I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is and will always be torture. That’s a simple statement.”

Waterboarding is a harsh interrogation tactic used by CIA officers in 2002 and 2003 on three alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. The tactic gives the subject the sensation of drowning.

US officials say the CIA has not used the technique since 2003, and CIA Director Michael Hayden prohibited it in 2006. The debate was revived recently when the CIA revealed it had destroyed videotapes showing interrogations of two terror suspects, both of whom were waterboarded.

Ridge’s comments come a week after a report that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said he would consider waterboarding torture if it were used against him.

In a separate interview on Thursday, the current Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, refused to say what he thinks of the interrogation technique. Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor and judge who also was assistant attorney-general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in 2002, said the question should be asked in the context of a specific set of facts and a specific statute and should not be posed abstractly.

“This is too important a discussion to have based on throwing one question at somebody,” Chertoff said.

Attorney-General Michael Mukasey has declined so far to rule whether waterboarding constitutes torture. An affirmative finding by Mukasey could put at risk the CIA interrogators who were authorized by the White House in 2002 to waterboard three prisoners deemed resistant to conventional techniques.—AP