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Administration Defends Use Of Waterboarding

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By DAN EGGEN, The Washington Post

Published: February 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration allowed CIA interrogators to use tactics that were "quite distressing, uncomfortable, even frightening," as long as they did not cause enough severe and lasting pain to constitute illegal torture, a senior Justice Department official said last week.

In testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee, Steven Bradbury, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, spelled out how the administration regulated the CIA's use of rough tactics and also offered new details of how simulated drowning was used to compel disclosures by suspected al-Qaida members.

It was not, he said, like the "water torture" used during the Spanish Inquisition and by autocratic governments into the 20th century but was subject to "strict time limits, safeguards, restrictions." He added, "the only thing in common is, I think, the use of water."

Bradbury indicated that no water entered the lungs of the three al-Qaida prisoners who were subjected to the practice, lending credence to previous accounts that the nose and mouth of CIA captives were covered in cloth or cellophane. The cellophane could pose a serious asphyxiation risk, torture experts said.

His unusually frank testimony Thursday stunned many civil liberties advocates and legal scholars, who have long criticized the Bush administration's secretive and aggressive interrogation policies.

Martin Lederman, a former Office of Legal Counsel official who teaches law at Georgetown University, called Bradbury's testimony "chilling." In an online posting, Lederman said that "to say that this is not severe physical suffering - is not torture - is absurd. And to invoke the defense that what the Spanish Inquisition did was worse and that we use a more benign, non-torture form of waterboarding ... is obscene."

U.S. officials have confirmed that the CIA's use of waterboarding - involving, they say, three detainees at secret prisons in 2002 and 2003 - required strapping them down and pouring water over their faces to make them fear that they were being drowned. Experts on human rights abuses say the approach was similar to the technique employed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the French in Algeria and, as recently as last year, the dictatorship in Myanmar.

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