General Michael Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a congressional committee on Thursday that waterboarding may be illegal under current law, despite assertions this week from the director of national intelligence and the White House that the harsh interrogation method may be used in the future.

Hayden said that while "all the techniques we've used have been deemed to be lawful," laws have changed since waterboarding was last used nearly five years ago.

"It is not included in the current program, and in my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that the technique would be considered to be lawful under current statute," Hayden said before the House Intelligence Committee.

A CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, later said that Hayden was in agreement with remarks earlier in the week by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, that any decision to use waterboarding in the future would require approval by the attorney general and the president.

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Gimigliano said Hayden was not prejudging the outcome of such a legal review, which would consider the impact of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which set restrictions on interrogation methods but do not explicitly bar the use of waterboarding.

He made his remarks as Vice President Dick Cheney defended tough interrogation tactics on people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda, and as Attorney General Michael Mukasey rebuffed Democrats' demands for a criminal investigation of waterboarding, which creates a feeling of drowning and was used on three Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. Mukasey said the CIA's interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, were approved by the Justice Department.

As a result, he told the House Judiciary Committee, waterboarding by CIA officers "cannot possibly be the subject of a Justice Department investigation, because that would mean that the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting someone who followed that advice."

The flurry of public statements about an interrogation technique that has not been used since mid-2003 showed how the harsh tactics secretly adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have become a stubborn political burden. The contradictory pronouncements also reflect deep divisions in the government over whether waterboarding is illegal torture, or whether it may be legal in extreme cases.

Cheney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington that President George W. Bush had made "tough and courageous" decisions in the campaign against terrorism.

"Would I support those same decisions again today? You're damn right I would," the vice president said. Cheney described the CIA detention program for high-level Qaeda operatives as "a tougher program, for tougher customers" that produced "information that has saved thousands of lives."

Despite such defenses, in practice the Bush administration has moved steadily away from the harshest techniques that the CIA used in the first two years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Hayden confirmed publicly for the first time this week that waterboarding was used on three Qaeda prisoners, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The technique was explicitly dropped from the CIA's authorized methods in 2006, Hayden said. But the Justice Department in 2005 wrote a series of secret legal opinions justifying waterboarding and other harsh methods, in part to assuage CIA officers' fears that they might face prosecution.

For human rights advocates, Hayden's statement was a modest positive sign. "It appears to be a long-overdue recognition of what the law is," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch.