US spy chief: Waterboarding is torture

The US national intelligence chief has said he believes the US interrogation practice known as "waterboarding" could be described as torture. "Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture," Mike McConnell told The New Yorker magazine on Jan. 13. Separately, the head of the US military said he wanted to close the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible because it had damaged America's international standing. "I'd like to see it shut down," Admiral Mike Mullen said. "I believe that from the standpoint of how it reflects on us that it's been pretty damaging." But Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said closing the prison posed major legal problems. "There are enormous challenges associated with that," he said. "There are enormously complex, complicating legal issues that are way out of my purview." McConnell's comments on waterboarding come as the US House Intelligence Committee continues an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes that are reported to have shown the use of the interrogation technique on suspects. He also said that should waterboarding ever be determined as torture, "there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it." "If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful!" he said. "Waterboarding," involves pouring water over subjects who are bound, gagged and hooded in order to terrify them by stimulating the feeling that they are drowning. McConnell stopped short of categorically describing the interrogation process as torture and declined to say whether he believed it should be formally labeled as such. Kevin Lanigan, from Human Rights First, told Al Jazeera: "It's a very important step for such a senior official in this [US] administration for the first time to admit that -- with some caveats on his admission -- that this technique is torture." Michael Mukasey, the US attorney general, has declined to rule on whether "waterboarding" is torture. A ruling that the technique does constitute torture would put at risk the CIA interrogators who were given permission by the White House in 2002 to use the technique on three prisoners who were considered resistant to conventional interrogation. McConnell said in his interview that the legal test for torture should be "pretty simple," suggesting: "Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?"