After resolutely refusing for years to say anything on the subject, top Bush administration officials have made a series of public disclosures about the U.S. government's use of "waterboarding" against a handful of top Al Qaeda suspects.

The comments, most notably by CIA Director Michael Hayden in Senate testimony Tuesday, were far from a complete accounting of the government's use of waterboarding, a practice that most international lawyers and even some administration officials now concede is tantamount to torture. But Hayden's public confirmation that the agency had in fact used waterboarding against three Al Qaeda leaders in 2002 and 2003—and then stopped—was a rare symbolic victory for officials inside the administration who have argued that the international furor over its use was badly hurting the United States' image around the world.

Waterboarding, a practice that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, involves strapping a subject to an inclined table and forcing water into his lungs, typically by pouring it into his mouth and nose. Even Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, appeared to condemn waterboarding this month when he told The New Yorker magazine: "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 this week told a Senate panel his comments were taken "out of context" and that he meant to be talking only about his days as a youngster "being a water safety instructor and teaching people how to swim.")

For months, U.S. officials have internally clashed over what the government should say about the matter. In little-noticed public comments in Geneva last November, John Bellinger, the State Department's chief legal adviser, said there was a "need for greater clarity about what is permitted and what is prohibited" when it came to interrogation techniques. A lack of clear guidelines, he said, "makes it more difficult for the United States to reaffirm our commitment to international law in the world."

But Bellinger's argument that the United States needed to have greater "clarity" about its interrogation practices ran into a brick wall in the form of Vice President Dick Cheney and his top aide, David Addington, according to a senior administration official who asked not to be publicly identified talking about internal deliberations. (Bellinger and Cheney's office declined comment). In private debates over the issue, Cheney and Addington insisted that any public comments about waterboarding at all—even a simple statement that the U.S. government no longer uses the technique—would help Al Qaeda operatives better prepare to resist U.S. interrogators, according to the official. It would be more effective for interrogation purposes to preserve "ambiguity" about what their CIA captors might do to them, the vice president's office contended, according to this official.

The debate over what to say or not say continued until last week, when Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte casually let drop, in an interview with National Journal, that "waterboarding had not been used in years. It wasn't used when I was director of national intelligence, nor even for a few years before that," he said. (Negroponte became the first to hold the newly created DNI post in 2005 and served in that capacity until January 2007.)

Negroponte's comments, which were seen as confirmation that waterboarding had in fact been used before that, were not cleared beforehand and caught White House officials off guard, according to the senior administration official. "It was an accidental disclosure," said the official. It also forced a reassessment of whether the administration should at least publicly confirm Negroponte's remarks, if only to reap whatever public-relations benefit could be derived from the slip.