UNITED STATES:HUMAN RIGHTS campaigners and Democratic legislators have condemned President George Bush for vetoing a Bill that would have forbidden CIA interrogators from using waterboarding and other forms of torture.
The Bill would have limited the CIA to 19 interrogation techniques used by the US military and identified in the Army Field Manual but Mr Bush said intelligence officers must have separate rules for dealing with suspected terrorists.
"My disagreement . . . is not over any particular interrogation technique; for instance, it is not over waterboarding, which is not part of the current CIA programme," Mr Bush said in a message to congress.
The CIA has admitted to using waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning that has been used by torturers since the Spanish Inquisition) on a number of suspects in 2003. The agency claims it no longer uses the technique, although the president and attorney-general can approve its use on a case-by-case basis.
"I cannot sign into law a Bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorising the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence programme, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack," Mr Bush said.
"The Bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror - the CIA programme to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. Were it not for this programme, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland."
Democrats said the president had ignored the advice of dozens of retired admirals and generals and leading foreign policy experts who believe that using harsh interrogation techniques is doing the US more harm than good.
"We are going to come back to this again and again and again - until waterboarding and other coercive techniques are prohibited once and for all. This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good, yet he chose instead to leave the door open to use torture in the future," said California senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate intelligence committee.
The Army Field Manual not only bans waterboarding but prohibits hooding prisoners, stripping them naked and forcing prisoners to perform or simulate sexual acts. It also bans beating, burning or physically hurting prisoners in other ways, subjecting them to extreme heat or cold or mock executions. Military interrogators may not withhold food, water or medical treatment or use dogs in any way during interrogation.
CIA director Michael Hayden told staff on Saturday the manual does not "exhaust the universe" of legal interrogation techniques.
"There are methods in the CIA's programme that have been briefed to our oversight committees, are fully consistent with the Geneva Convention and current US law and are most certainly not torture," wrote Gen Hayden in a memo.
