Senate report: Rice, Cheney OK'd CIA use of waterboarding

A new Senate intelligence report shows that Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and other top Bush officials approved the use of waterboarding by the CIA in 2002. President Obama has banned waterboarding, a interrogation technique which simulates drowning, and classified it as torture. In 2002 Rice approved the waterboarding of several top terror suspects, and the Justice Department deemed it lawful. One memo shows the CIA used waterboarding on its top two suspects over 266 times. Cheney continues to stand by the Bush administrations waterboarding, saying that the "alternative interrogation methods" were successful, and gained a wealth of information.

Opinion: I firmly believe that waterboarding is a form of torture, no matter how torture is defined. It sickens me how the government adjusts the meaning of 'torture' whenever it benefits them. Waterboarding, although not lethal, causes tremendous mental pain, and physical pain. It terrorizes victims to the point of panic. Torture is torture. The excuse Cheney uses, that waterboarding is worth the information it gives the government, is bogus. I doubt the legitimacy of any information which is gained under torturous circumstances. When a person is brought to the point of near death, they will say anything, true or false, to save themselves. The prisoners know what their 'interrogators' want to hear, and they can spin as many lies as they want to escape the pain. How does one know if the information they are getting from a terrorist is real or phony, especially if it is during torture? I am relieved that the Bush administration is out of the White House so that our country will no longer be disgraced by this embarassing human rights violation. If it were any other country doing this, the world (including the U.S.) would have cracked down on them, and punished them. We are too powerful to see our own faults sometimes.
http://edition.cnn.hu/2009/CRIME/05/09/georgia.professor.shooting/index.html