Bush. However, the law did not affect the CIA's use of waterboarding. When Congress passed a bill restricting the use of waterboarding by the CIA in 2008, President Bush vetoed it. In January 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13491, which banned the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in interrogations of detainees by any government agency. In April 2009, President Obama stated that he considered waterboarding to be torture. Origin of the term While the technique has been used in various forms for centuries, the term water board was recorded first in a 1976 UPI report: "A Navy spokesman admitted use of the 'water board' torture ... to 'convince each trainee that he won't be able to physically resist what an enemy would do to him.'" The verb-noun waterboarding dates from 2004. Techniques using forcible drowning to extract information had hitherto been referred to as "water torture", "water treatment", "water cure" or simply "torture". Professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, author of Torture and Democracy (2007), speculates that the term waterboarding probably has its origin in the need for a euphemism. Technique The practice of waterboarding has differed. During the Algerian War of Independence and Marcos' dictatorship in the Philippines, waterboarding involved forcing the victim to swallow or inhale water. Other forms of waterboarding prevent water from entering the lungs. The United States Army's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training occasionally included waterboarding, in a less severe form that only mimicked drowning. Different accounts of waterboarding by the United States disagree about how it is practiced. Some accounts describe saturated cloth and water being used to create a misperception of drowning, while others describe water entering the body. The United States' Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002 responded to the request by the CIA for a legal opinion regarding the use of certain interrogation techniques. It included the following account of the CIA's definition of waterboarding in a Top Secret 2002 memorandum as follows: Historically in the West, the technique is known to have been used in the Spanish Inquisition. The suffocation of bound prisoners with water has been favored because, unlike most other torture techniques, it produces no marks on the body. CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the technique have lasted an average of 14 seconds before refusing to continue. Reported demonstrations In 2006 and 2007, Fox News and Current