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'For Me It Would Be Torture,' Official Says Of Waterboarding

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By PAMELA HESS, The Associated Press

Published: January 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - The nation's intelligence chief says waterboarding "would be torture" if used against him or if someone under interrogation was taking water into his lungs.
Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture, however.

"If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," McConnell told The New Yorker, which published a 16,000-word article today on the director of national intelligence.

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.

As McConnell describes it, a prisoner is strapped down with a washcloth 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," McConnell told the magazine.

A spokesman for McConnell said he does not dispute the quotes attributed to him in the story by Lawrence Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for "The Looming Towers," a book on al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 attacks.

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 said.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto refused comment Saturday on waterboarding.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has declined to rule on whether waterboarding is torture. An affirmative finding could put at risk the CIA interrogators given permission by the White House in 2002 to waterboard three prisoners deemed resistant to conventional techniques.

The CIA has not used the technique since 2003; CIA Director Michael Hayden prohibited it in 2006.

The House and Senate intelligence committees want to prohibit the CIA from using 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 President Bush. Last summer he issued an executive order allowing the CIA to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" that go beyond what is allowed by the Army.

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