US intelligence czar Mike McConnell, in an interview released on Sunday, equated water boarding with torture, and denied that the United States tortures terror suspects during interrogation.
“Water boarding would be excruciating,” the director of national security said in the interview in the New Yorker magazine, speaking of the simulated drowning technique that many regard as torture.
“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,” he said. When asked to define torture, McConnell replied: “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.”
While denying that US officials sanctioned the torture of terror suspects, McConnell told the New Yorker that the Central Intelligence Agency’s “special methods” of interrogation had yielded “meaningful” intelligence.
“Have we gotten meaningful information? You betcha. Tons! Does it save lives? Tons! We’ve gotten incredible information.” But also he told the magazine flatly: “We don’t torture.” Water boarding involves pouring water over a suspect who is bound and gagged, creating the fear that he or she is about to drown. It has become a focus of debate in the United States after revelations last month that the CIA in 2005 destroyed tapes of interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects reportedly undergoing water boarding, sparking charges that it was covering up possible torture.
CIA director Michael Hayden has denied that torture took place and argued that the tapes, made in 2002, were destroyed to protect the identities of CIA agents. Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday that the CIA has launched an internal search for more audiotapes or videos depicting interrogations of suspected terrorists.
Citing information from two unnamed US officials, the weekly reported that the hunt is part of the agency’s response to simultaneous investigations by the US Justice Department, Congress and the agency’s inspector general.