Senate Democrats demanded 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 testimony on Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge the agency used waterboarding on detainees following the Sept. 11 attacks.
In waterboarding, a person is strapped down and water poured over the cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back 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-Qaeda 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 on 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 Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat and a member of the Judiciary Committee, to call on the Department of Justice to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of waterboarding violated any law.
The Pentagon bans 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, 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 Judge Mark Filip to be the Justice Department's No. 2 official if the criminal inquiry was not opened.
Human Rights Watch, which has been calling on the US to outlaw waterboarding as a form of illegal torture, called Hayden's testimony "an explicit admission of criminal activity." Critics say waterboarding has been outlawed under the UN Convention Against Torture.
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