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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 5th,
2008 - CIA Says Used Waterboarding Three Times |
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CIA Says Used Waterboarding
Three Times By Randall Mikkelsen Reuters February 5, 2008 Washington - The CIA on
three occasions shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks used a widely condemned
interrogation technique known as waterboarding, CIA Director Michael Hayden
told Congress on Tuesday. "Waterboarding has been
used on only three detainees," Hayden told the Senate Intelligence
Committee. It was the first time a U.S. official publicly specified the
number of people subjected to waterboarding and named them. Critics call waterboarding a
form of illegal torture. Congress is considering banning the technique. Those subjected to
waterboarding were suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and
senior al Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Hayden
said. He said waterboarding has
not been used in five years but was used then because of concerns of imminent
catastrophic attacks on the United States and because authorities had limited
knowledge of al Qaeda. "The circumstances are
different than they were in late 2001, early 2002," Hayden said. He told reporters later that
the interrogations of Mohammed and Zubaydah were particularly fruitful. From the time of their
capture in 2002 until they were delivered to Guantanamo Bay prison in 2006,
the two suspects accounted for one-fourth of the human intelligence reports
on al Qaeda, Hayden said. Although some analysts have
questioned Mohammed's credibility under interrogation, most of the
information was reliable and helped lead to other al Qaeda suspects, he said. He told the committee he
opposed limiting the CIA to using interrogation techniques permitted in the
U.S. Army Field Manual, which bans waterboarding. CIA interrogators are
better trained, and it works with a narrower range of suspects in its
interrogations, he said. Hayden said fewer than 100
people had been held in the CIA's terrorism detention and interrogation
program, with fewer than one-third of them subjected to any harsh
interrogation techniques. A senior intelligence
official said after the hearing that it was unclear whether the CIA could
legally use waterboarding in the future, given changes in U.S. law. The Bush
administration says it neither uses nor condones torture. The CIA said in December
that it had destroyed videotapes depicting the interrogations of Zubaydah and
Nashiri, prompting a Justice Department investigation. © Reuters 2007. All rights
reserved. External link: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN05191813 |