A senior adviser to former US President George W Bush has defended tough interrogation techniques, saying their use helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as “Bush’s brain”, said he “was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists”. He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

In 2009, President Barack Obama banned waterboarding as a form of torture. But the practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002, providing legal cover for its use. In 2008, CIA head Michael Hayden told Congress it had only been used on three high-profile al-Qaeda detainees, and not for the past five years.

One of those was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key suspect in the 9/11 attacks. Mr Rove said US soldiers were subjected to waterboarding as a regular part of their training. A less severe form of the technique was used on the three suspects interrogated at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, he added.

“I’m proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying aeroplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an aeroplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots,” Mr Rove told the BBC…

[continues at the BBC]

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking — and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session — and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session — a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

Read More: Salon

A 27-year-old Washington state soldier allegedly admitted Sunday to having held his daughter’s head in a bowl of water because she couldn’t recite the alphabet — “submerg[ing] her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.”

His girlfriend told police that the girl had been found in a closer with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.

Tabor was arrested after being seen in his neighborhood in a Tacoma suburb wearing a Kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows.