The White House gave explicit
written approval to the waterboarding of captured al-Qaida suspects by
their CIA interrogators, it was reported today.

The report in
today’s Washington Post presents the most compelling evidence to date
that the highest levels of George Bush’s White House gave approval to
the specifics of an interrogation practice in which detainees were
strapped to a board while water was poured down their nose and throats.

Two secret memos were issued at the CIA’s request, in 2003 and 2004, to authorise waterboarding.

The
then director of the CIA, George Tenet, had asked for the written
authorisation because he was worried about a possible backlash –
including possible prosecution – of intelligence officials, the Post
reported.

“The suggestion that someone from [the] CIA came in and
browbeat everybody is ridiculous,” one former agency official told the
Post.

“The CIA understood that it was controversial and would
be widely criticised if it became public. But given the tenor of the
times and the belief that more attacks were coming, they felt they had
to do what they could to stop the attack.”

The existence of the
memos provides the first clear evidence that the White House was
involved in the specifics of how al-Qaida suspects were interrogated.

Until
today, it was known only that the White House had given sweeping
approval to kill or capture al-Qaida operatives in George Bush’s memo
authorising the war on terror on September 15 2001.

But it was not known how deeply the White House had involved itself in the treatment of detainees.

Civil
rights organisations today said the report provided new evidence of the
close involvement of the White House in establishing a standard of
treatment for detainees that was put in operation from Guantanamo to
Abu Ghraib.

“This new report supplies further evidence that the
decision to endorse torture was made by the administration’s most
senior officials,” Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the American Civil
Liberties Union, said in a statement.

The newspaper did not specify who signed the memos, or provide detailed accounts of their contents.

However,
its account of the exchanges over time between a worried Tenet and the
White House suggest that the CIA director was anxious for the Bush
administration to sign off on waterboarding at the highest possible
levels.

By 2003, when the White House issued the first memo
described today by the Post, at least three high level al-Qaida
suspects had already been subjected to waterboarding, including Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

By that
point as well, US justice department officials had already provided the
CIA with legal cover for the technique in a 2002 memo.

But
apparently the justice department approval was not reassurance enough
for the CIA, which was concerned at creating a paper trail showing the
Bush administration had authorised the practice.

The White House
issued its first memo in June 2003 following a meeting between Tenet
and members of the national security council, the Post reported.

Condoleezza Rice, the then national security adviser, attended the meeting.

A few days later, the White House issued a brief memo authorising the CIA’s interrogation method.

Those
concerns grew deeper in April 2004 when the revelations about the
mistreatment and humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became
an international scandal. Tenet made a request for additional
authorisation in June 2004. The authorisation came in mid-July.

The
first indication that the White House had direct knowledge of specific
interrogation techniques came to light last month during extraordinary
testimony to Congress by Condoleezza Rice, who was national security
adviser during Bush’s first term.

In written testimony, Rice told Congress that she and other senior
officials, including the vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been briefed by Tenet about waterboarding in early 2002.

Rice
said officials were so concerned about the use of such tactics that
they directed the justice department to investigate whether they were
legal.