WASHINGTON, Jan 15: US attorney general-designate Eric Holder on Thursday branded the interrogation technique known as “waterboarding” as torture, in a sharp break from Bush administration’s “war on terror” tactics.

President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to be the US government’s top lawyer vowed to make US anti-terrorism policies consistent with fundamental “American values and the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

“I agree with you Mr Chairman, waterboarding is torture,” Holder told Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, during his confirmation hearing.

Holder, who expected a rough confirmation ride but was ultimately likely to prevail, would be the first African-American to serve as the US government’s top lawyer.

Waterboarding, or simulated drowning, was used in the Spanish Inquisition and by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and the CIA has admitted it used the technique on several of the top Al Qaeda plotters of the September 11 attacks.

The practice has been fiercely condemned by human rights groups, which also have concerns about other “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The two most recent Bush administration attorney generals had declined to go as far as Holder on waterboarding, and in an interview last week Vice-President Dick Cheney

defended the practice, saying it yielded vital intelligence.

Holder was also asked whether he believed that the US president had the constitutional power to “immunise” an intelligence officer to carry out an act of torture on a terror suspect.

“No one is above the law, the president has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law of the United States,” said Holder. “It’s my belief that the president does not have the power that you have indicated.”

The Bush administration, which has said US interrogators do not currently use waterboarding, maintains that all interrogation tactics currently in use are legal.

This week President George W. Bush said he hoped his successor Obama would carefully weigh keeping controversial interrogation tactics and other policies that his administration put in place to fight the “war on

terror”.

Holder admitted that the decisions made on practices like waterboarding by the Bush administration during the dark days following the September 11 attacks had been difficult and were easy to criticise in hindsight.

“Having said that, the president-elect and I are worried, disturbed by what we have seen and heard.”

Our Correspondent in Washington adds: Holder said the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would not be closed as soon as the incoming Obama administration would like.

The physical act of closing the facility was not a problem, he noted. The more pressing question was the fate of the roughly 250 inmates currently held there.

Some of the inmates, Holder said, could be sent to other countries, while others could be prosecuted. A third group of inmates could not be tried “for a variety of reasons” but also couldn’t be released because they were too dangerous.

For that reason, the Obama administration would not be able to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility “as soon as we’d like”.