Negroponte Says Waterboarding Once Used

We've been told time and again that the United States doesn't torture people in the course of interrogations. Now John Negroponte, who formerly served as the Director of National Intelligence, has said in an interview that the United States used to waterboard people, but it was a couple of years ago so we shouldn't focus on it.

Paul Kiel at TPMuckraker makes the excellent point that the White House has tried to put this fire out before:

It's no secret that after 9/11, the administration authorized the use of waterboarding, and that the technique was used on a number of detainees in 2002 and reportedly stopped in 2003. But the administration has never explicitly admitted that.

In fact, when Dick Cheney, seduced into loose talk by a friendly interviewer, confirmed that "a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives," the White House furiously backpedaled, and Tony Snow did his best to proclaim that "a dunk in water" had not been a reference to waterboarding, but just "a dunk in the water."

I'm sure no one in the White House is happy to see Negroponte being so forthcoming on the issue, even if he is trying to frame it in an aw-shucks-don't-we-have-better-things-to-worry-about sort of way. I think this is indicative of a pattern we've been seeing for some time, as secrets and lies from within the Bush's administration's way of doing business start to come unraveled. I am willing to bet good money that more revelations like this about waterboarding, interrogations, the war on terror, domestic civil rights, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be coming out over the next year.