Waterboarding, Interrogation Techniques | featured news

Former Vice President Cheney calls for the White House to stop investigating the CIA over enhanced interrogation techniques, saying agents should be 'decorated' after the killing of Usama bin Laden.

Jay Bybee, who drafted the controversial legal memoranda with lawyer John Yoo, tells a House committee that repeated waterboarding and other techniques were not approved by the Justice Department.

The former Justice Department official who co-wrote the so-called torture memos testified that the department did not sanction some of the harsh methods the CIA used against detainees during the George W.

A senior advisor to the former American president, George Bush, has defended harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying he was proud of the intelligence the US gained by using them. Karl Rove said the use of waterboarding had helped ...

Congressional Republicans are rushing to defend the CIA after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the spy agency of misleading ...

Records do little to settle a dispute over whether the speaker of the House knew in 2002 that waterboarding had already been used against one prisoner.

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government's use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Current and former U.S. officials say the failure to carefully examine the value of 'enhanced' methods like waterboarding -- despite calls to do so as early as 2003 -- was part of a broader trend.

The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on alleged Al Qaeda prisoners for nearly seven years without ever seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former U.S.

Former Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice verbally approved CIA's request to waterboard suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.