Message to CNN: Waterboarding = War Crime.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's pick for attorney general called the interrogation technique known as waterboarding a "repugnant" practice Tuesday, but again refused to say whether it violates U.S. laws banning torture.

The thing that actually amazes me about the whole thing is that he didn't just do like every other Bush nominee up on the stand - just LIE.

On a different note I love this paragraph from the same article:

Human rights groups consider waterboarding -- in which prisoners are strapped down and either dunked in water or have water poured over them in order to produce the sensation of drowning -- a form of torture.

Really CNN? Just "human rights advocates"? The Washington Post gave more background on waterboarding earlier this month:

...Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.