WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats demanded a criminal investigation Tuesday into waterboarding by government interrogators after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that the tactic was used on three suspects.
In congressional testimony Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge the agency used waterboarding on detainees after 9/11. That prompted Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to call on the Justice Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of the tactic, which creates the sensation of drowning, violated any law. The Pentagon has banned its employees from using waterboarding to extract information from detainees, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators do not use coercive tactics.
