Cheney admits Bush administration sanctioned war crimes! [View All]

[ProSense]

Posted on Wed, Oct. 25, 2006

Cheney confirms that detainees were subjected to water-boarding

By Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that's banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture. Some intelligence professionals argue that it often provides false or misleading information because many subjects will tell their interrogators what they think they want to hear to make the water-boarding stop.

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Now Mr. Bush is trying - after the fact - to establish a legal foundation for a secret CIA program that has operated since 2002. The problem is that some of the wording in Common Article 3 leaves Americans who participated in the interrogations vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0921/p03s03-uspo.html