US acknowledges use of waterboarding

 
Washington, Feb6

 
Senate Democrats are demanding a criminal investigation into waterboarding by government interrogators after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that the tactic was used on three terror suspects. In congressional hearing on Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to acknowledge publicly that the agency used waterboarding on detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

 
Waterboarding involves strapping a person 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 admitted in the congressional hearing that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahimal-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director MikeMcConnell told senators during the same hearing that waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal so long as it hasthe specific consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general. The admission prompted Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin to demand that theJustice Department open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of waterboarding violated any law. FBI Director Robert Mueller had earlier claimed that his investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terrorsuspects. Human Rights Watch, which has been urging the government to outlawwaterboarding as illegal torture, called Haydens testimony “an explicit admissionof criminal activity.” Joanne Mariner, the groups counterterrorism directorstated Waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime.

-AP