Barack Obama, the US president, is due to visit the headquarters of the CIA amid a fresh controversy over the US intelligence agency's use of its "waterboarding" interrogation technique.During his visit to the base at Langley, Virginia, on Monday, Obama is expected to seek to reassure agency officers they will not face prosecution for carrying out interrogations using such harsh methods.But the visit has been overshadowed by a New York Times report that CIA interrogators "waterboarded" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has confessed to planning the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, 183 times, according to an official document.The 2005 US justice department memorandum also showed that Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda operative, was waterboarded 83 times, far more than the agency originally said, the Times reported on Sunday.A former CIA officer had previously said Zubaydah had only been subjected to 35 seconds of waterboarding, which simulates the sensation of drowning.Some critics have accused Obama of undermining the US intelligence community after he ordered the release of "top secret" memos on interrogation techniques that have largely been condemned as torture.
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