Waterboarding Banned In Senate Vote
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted yesterday to prohibit the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects despite President Bush’s threat to veto any measure that limits the agency’s interrogation techniques.
The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year. The bill would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual, which prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning. The bill passed on a 51-45 vote.
The House had approved the measure in December, so yesterday’s Senate vote set up a confrontation with the White House, where Mr. Bush has promised to veto any bill that restricts CIA questioning. Arguing for such restrictions, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat of West Virginia, said the use of harsh tactics would boomerang on America.
“Retaliation is the way of the world. What we do to others, they will do to us — but worse,” Mr. Rockefeller said. “This debate is about more than legality. It is also about morality, the way we see ourselves … and what we represent to the world.”
The legislation bars the CIA from using waterboarding, sensory deprivation, or other harsh coercive methods to break a prisoner who refuses to answer questions. Those practices were banned by the military in 2006.
CIA Director General Michael Hayden said last week that current law and court decisions, including the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, cast doubt on whether waterboarding would be legal now. Mr. Hayden prohibited its use in CIA interrogations in 2006; it has not been used since 2003, he said. Mr. Hayden warned Congress that if the CIA were limited to military techniques, it would adhere to them without wavering, even if it meant failing to get urgent and crucial information. He contends the CIA has different interrogation needs than the military and requires more latitude.
“I guarantee you we will live within those confines of any statute of that nature. But you have to understand there would be no exceptions,” he said.
