Senate Democrats demanded a criminal investigation into waterboarding by government interrogators Tuesday after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that the tactic was used on three terror suspects. In congressional testimony Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge the agency used waterboarding on detainees following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Waterboarding involves strapping a suspect down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world.
"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed." Hayden said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told senators during the same hearing Tuesday that waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal — so long as it as the specific consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.
That prompted Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat and a member of the Judiciary Committee, to call on the Justice Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of waterboarding violated any law. The Pentagon has banned its employees from using waterboarding to extract information from detainees, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects. Durbin, already frustrated with Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s refusal last week to define waterboarding a form of torture as critics have, said he would block the nomination of the Justice Department’s No. 2 official if the criminal inquiry isn’t opened.
It was a particularly sharp threat by Durbin, who represents Illinois — the same state that U.S. District Judge Mark Filip of Chicago, the deputy attorney general nominee, calls home. "In light of the Justice Department’s continued non-responsiveness to Congress on the issue of torture, including your disappointing testimony on waterboarding last week, I have reluctantly concluded that placing a hold on Judge Filip’s nomination is my only recourse for eliciting timely and complete responses to important questions on torture," Durbin wrote in a letter to Mukasey on Tuesday. He added: "A Justice Department investigation should explore whether waterboarding was authorized and whether those who authorized it violated the law." …
"Look. We’ve got to get this waterboarding thing on the table. They’ve got the A.G. cornered in the hearings. Should we go for the usual Friday afternoon release?"
"No. Let’s do it on Super Tuesday. They’ll be all involved in the voting and watching the returns."
"How much of it do we have to acknowledge?"
"Oh. Lets just talk about right after 9/11. Everybody knows how scared they were back then. Leave out the rest."
We’re so used to the Bush Administration’s secrecy and lies that they may get away with this strategy. But, somewhere, sometime, it’s got to dawn on us that we went into things with torture and indefinite imprisonment on the agenda. It wasn’t something that was cooked up in the moment. It was up front [for example at
Gitmo, "Camp Delta is a 612-unit detention center built between
February 27 and April 2002 which includes detention camps 1 through 6 and Camp Echo"]. So, for that matter, was the domestic surveillance business. It wasn’t a reaction to something, it was part of a plan. Where did these ideas come from? We know they were Cheney-backed ideas. But where did they originate? These are the darker underbelly of the Bush Doctrine. We know this "Doctrine" came to light of day with
Paul Wolfowitz under
Bush I. We know it festered at
A.E.I. and
P.N.A.C. But the exact
who,
when, and
where remains a misty secret. I personally smell rats from across the waters, but that may be far fetched. We have plenty enough rats of our very own. Whatever its origins, it’s a shameful piece of our recent history – as is almost everything else associated with this Administration
…
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