'Waterboarding' is torture: US attorney general-designate Agence France-Presse

Published: Thursday January 15, 2009





Print This Email This US attorney-general designate Eric Holder on Thursday said the interrogation technique known as 'waterboarding' which simulates drowning, equated to torture.



"I agree with you Mr Chairman, waterboarding is torture," Holder told Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, during his confirmation hearing.



Holder was also asked whether he believed that the US president had the constitutional power to "immunize" an intelligence officer to carry out an act of torture on a terror suspect.



"No one is above the law, the president has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law of the United States," said Holder.



"It's my belief that the president does not have the power that you have indicated."



Holder was named by president-elect Barack Obama to serve as attorney general when he takes over the White House on Tuesday, and would be the first African-American to serve as the US government's top lawyer.



Previous attorney general nominees under the Bush administration have declined to publicly describe waterboarding as torture.



Waterboarding, a staple of brutal interrogations from the Spanish Inquisition to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, usually consists of strapping down a captive, covering his face with a cloth and pouring water onto the cloth to simulate drowning.



The Central Intelligence Agency has admitted using the technique on Al-Qaeda suspects including alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed following the 2001 attacks, at a time when further strikes on the United States were believed to be imminent.



Rights groups have decried the technique as torture.



The Bush administration, which has said US interrogators do not currently use waterboarding, maintains that all interrogation tactics currently in use are legal.



On Monday, President George W. Bush said he hoped his successor Obama would carefully weigh keeping controversial interrogation tactics and other policies that his administration put in place to fight the "war on terror."



