United States:US intelligence chief Mike McConnell said in a magazine interview that waterboarding would be torture if it was used against him personally, but stopped short of condemning the controversial interrogation technique.
Mr McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was quoted in the New Yorkeras defining torture as "something that would cause excruciating pain". Asked if waterboarding - the practice of covering a person's face with a cloth and then dripping water on it to bring on a feeling of drowning - fitted that definition, he said that for him personally, it would.
"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful," he said. "Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."
But he rejected a suggestion that he condemned the practice. The reputation of the US has been badly tarnished internationally by its harsh treatment of prisoners detained in president George Bush's war on terror, particularly those held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.
US attorney general Michael Mukasey has declined to rule whether waterboarding is torture.
"You can do waterboarding lots of ways . . . I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning," Mr McConnell said in the New Yorker, which paraphrased him as agreeing that this would certainly be torture.
Mr McConnell said he could not be more specific because "if it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it".
When asked whether the United States had gained meaningful information through torture, he denied the US used torture, then added that "tons" of meaningful information had been received using certain interrogation techniques: "Does it save lives? Tons!"
- (Reuters)