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.