Former CIA Executive Director Buzzy Krongard told BBC on Monday that the CIA did engage in torture:

[BBC] asked Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s former executive director, if he thought waterboarding and painful stress positions were torture:

“Well, let’s put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that’s torture. I’m comfortable with saying that,” he explained.

Krongard isn’t the first high-level official to admit that what the CIA did was torture.  The following officials also admitted that the CIA tortured:

• President Obama

• Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General

• Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General
  

• Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security

• Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

• Barry McCaffrey, 4-Star General, who was awarded three Purple Hearts, two Distinguished Service Crosses, and two Silver Stars

• David Irving, Brigadier General

• The Senate Intelligence Committee

• Colonel Morris Davis, the Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions

• Darrel Vandeveld, former prosecutor in the Guantanamo military commissions

• Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell

• Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence

• Matthew Alexander, a former top Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

• Jack Cloonan, Mike Marks, Jim Clemente, Joe Navarro, and Luis Busquets, FBI officers

• John Kiriakou, CIA officer and interrogator

• Ricardo Sanchez, Lieutenant General and the former top coalition commander in Iraq

• Thomas Romig, Major General and Army JAG

• Antonio Taguba, Major General

• The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner

• Downing Street

• The United States has always considered waterboarding to be a crime of torture, including when the Japanese did it in WWII (and see this)

Why does this matter?

Because top experts say that torture doesn’t work to provide evidence (even in a “ticking time bomb” scenario) … and that it severely harms America’s national security.