Waterboarding

President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney dueled Thursday over the way America should detain and interrogate suspected terrorists, with Obama renewing his vow to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Cheney forcefully denying that the Bush administration used torture to extract information. In speeches only minutes apart at different venues in Washington, the two set out starkly different views of how to guarantee the nation's security while preserving American values.

In a bid to defuse political skirmishing over the Bush administration's interrogation methods, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta urged Congress on Monday not to allow the debate to become a distraction from the security threats facing the country. "We are a nation at war," Panetta said at a Los Angeles forum. "We have to confront that reality every day.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) "ought to either present the evidence or apologize" in the wake of her comments that CIA officials misled her about the use of controversial interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. "Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime," Boehner said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused the Bush administration and the CIA of misleading Congress about waterboarding prisoners, escalating a political fight with Republicans over her knowledge of the treatment of detainees. Separately Thursday, the CIA rejected a request from former Vice President Dick Cheney to declassify memos that Cheney has said show that the agency's severe interrogation methods were crucial to getting information from detainees that helped disrupt terrorism plots.

The partisan clash over controversial Bush administration interrogation methods intensified Wednesday at a Senate hearing, with the chairman saying a "truth commission" is all but inevitable. A Republican colleague, however, suggested that Democrats were exploiting the controversy for political gain.

Congressional leaders were briefed repeatedly on the CIA's use of severe interrogation methods on Al Qaeda suspects, according to new information released by the Obama administration Thursday that appears to contradict the assertions of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The CIA used an arsenal of severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects for nearly seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The failure to conduct a comprehensive examination occurred despite calls to do so as early as 2003.

Re "Files detail CIA tactics on captives," April 17 Just because torture was legal in Nazi Germany did not make it right. Nor did it protect Nazi war criminals from prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. Just because some fanatical lawyers in the Bush administration decided that torture should be legal does not make it right either. What happens the next time some despot, here or abroad, decides that torture is legal? Do we let that pass? We must prosecute these criminals in the Central Intelligence Agency to the fullest extent of the law or we, as a civilized society, will have failed.

The release of internal Bush administration interrogation memos this week answered long-standing questions about the CIA's techniques for getting prisoners to talk, but left unsettled a debate in Washington over whether those methods worked. The White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee are in the early stages of inquiries designed to address that issue, which nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks remains one of the most divisive in the intelligence community.

A former No. 2 State Department official in the Bush administration says he hopes he would have had the courage to resign if he had known the CIA was subjecting terrorism suspects to waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning. Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of State, told Al Jazeera English television in an interview airing Wednesday that waterboarding is torture.