Democrats in Congress have called on the White House to hand over two secret memos that apparently still authorise painful interrogation techniques that the administration publicly renounced three years ago.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged that the justice department secretly issued two legal opinions on methods used to interrogate suspected terrorists but declined to say if the memos authorised practices such as head-slapping and simulated drowning.
"This country does not torture. It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture and we do not," she said.
The New York Times reported yesterday that in 2005, months after the administration declared that torture was "abhorrent" and as Congress was moving to ban some interrogation methods, the justice department issued secret memos authorising specific techniques.
The newspaper said authorisation is still in force and noted that the CIA this summer resumed interrogation of suspected terrorists in secret prisons outside the US, which had been suspended after action in Congress and the courts.
After September 11th, 2001, President George W Bush gave the CIA sweeping powers to capture, detain and kill al-Qaeda operatives throughout the world and declared that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which forbids torture and cruel and humiliating treatment of captives, did not apply to al-Qaeda.
In August 2002, the justice department issued a memo arguing that physical torture must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".
In 2004 the justice department withdrew the 2002 memo, declared torture "abhorrent" and appeared to back away from heavy-handed interrogation methods. A year later, however, after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general, the department issued two other legal opinions which were not made public. Mr Gonzales resigned earlier this year after a scandal over the sacking of nine federal prosecutors.
The first opinion explicitly allowed certain interrogation techniques including, according to yesterday's report, head slapping, simulated drowning and leaving detainees naked in freezing cells for hours. A second secret opinion in 2005 declared that none of the CIA's interrogation practices violated a new law Congress was working on to ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment.
House judiciary chairman John Conyers promised a congressional inquiry into the opinions, demanding that the White House hand over the secret memos and make their authors available to testify.
"Both the alleged content of these opinions and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling, especially in light of the department's 2004 withdrawal of an earlier opinion similarly approving such methods," Mr Conyers said in a letter to acting attorney general Peter Keisler.
Ms Perino said the 2004 anti-torture opinion was a "broad and general" interpretation of the law and the February 2005 opinion was different in that it was focused on specifics. She did not dispute the New York Times' report that the CIA was once again questioning detainees in secret prisons overseas.
"We know that these are ruthless individuals . . . they'll do anything to try to carry out their attacks. And this president has put in place, all within the foursquare corners of the law, tools in the global war on terror that we need," she said.