DNI McConnell suggests waterboarding is torture.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said that waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him, but still declined to say whether the technique should be legally classified as torture:

“If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture,” McConnell told the magazine. […]

McConnell said the legal test for torture should be “pretty simple”: “Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?”

McConnell warned that if waterboarding is “ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.”