Intelligence chief: Waterboarding ‘torture’

A US intelligence chief says waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him or if someone under interrogation was actually taking water into their lungs.

But Mike McConnell, in an interview published yesterday in The New Yorker magazine, declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique should be categorically considered torture.

As Mr McConnell describes it, a prisoner is strapped down with a wash cloth over his face and water is dripped into his nose.

“If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture,” said Mr McConnell.

“If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it,” he said.

The comments come as the House Intelligence Committee investigates the CIA’s destruction of videotaped interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. The tapes were made in 2002 and destroyed three years later, over fears they would leak.

They depicted the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against two of the three men known to have been waterboarded by the CIA.

Mr McConnell said the legal test for torture should be “pretty simple”.

“Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?” he asked.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto refused to comment on waterboarding.

Amnesty International has condemned the practice as “absolute torture”.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Noeleen Hartigan, programmes director of Amnesty in Ireland, said yesterday: “I think it is ironic that 60 years ago the US charged a Japanese officer for waterboarding. It is bizarre that there is a legal loophole in relation to this.”

“We welcome Mike McConnell’s comments but they won’t change legislation until the attorney- general reviews all aspects relating to torture, including this issue,” said Ms Hartigan.

“If the US wants to be seen as leading the battle against terror, it has to stop using torture to be credible.”

Attorney-general Michael Mukasey has declined to rule on whether waterboarding is torture. The House and Senate intelligence committees want to prohibit the CIA from using any interrogation techniques not allowed by the military. That list includes waterboarding. If their bill authorizing intelligence activities for 2008 is approved by Congress, it almost certainly will face a veto from US President Gearge W Bush.

Last summer he issued an executive order allowing the CIA to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” that go beyond what is allowed in the 2006 Army Field Manual.