‘USING THOSE techniques saved lives,” former President George W Bush told an NBC interviewer on Monday of “waterboarding” and similar “enhanced interrogation” that he had secretly approved after 9/11. “My job was to protect America. And I did.”
“Interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London and multiple targets in the United States,” Bush writes in his autobiography. Yet, the morality of torture apart, it is a highly dubious assertion that intelligence figures in the US and UK yesterday contested, insisting such information could have been, and some was, obtained by traditional interrogation. He certainly did not protect American values.
Promoting his 497-page book, Decision Points, an apologia pro sua,Bush has sought to justify a series of key decisions, from his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – "I gave diplomacy every chance to work", he told NBC without a hint of irony – and on to the use of the technique which simulates drowning, described and banned by his successor as torture. "No doubt the procedure was tough," Bush writes, "but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm".
To justify waterboarding, despite the reality that the US had prosecuted its soldiers during the Vietnam war for using the technique, Mr Bush leaned on secret – and now deeply disputed – legal opinions from his attorney general and presidential office lawyers. A 2002 memo from the latter argued that no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death”. That was enough for him, Bush told NBC. “He said it did not fall within the anti-torture act. I’m not a lawyer. But you’ve got to trust the judgment of people around you, and I do.”
However, critics recall that it was a highly political judgment that saw his now-discredited lawyers bending over backwards to provide advice they believed the president and vice-president Cheney wanted to hear. It was also opposed strongly at the time and since by the defence department, among other internal critics, concerned that the use of such techniques was both ineffective in extracting truthful information and would undermine attempts to protect their own servicemen from similar treatment if captured.
The unprecedented authorisation of torture by a US president also played a huge part internationally in delegitimising the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It does nothing to improve the legacy of the former president.