Bush told The Times of London that the coercive interrogation technique -- where water is poured over a person's mouth and nose, simulating the effects of drowning -- had helped reveal plots to attack London's Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf, one of the British capital's main financial districts. "Three people were waterboarded, and I believe that decision saved lives," he told the paper, which is serializing Bush's new book, "Decision Points."
University of Mobile / AP
George W. Bush addresses the University of Mobile Leadership Banquet at the Arthur Outlaw Convention Center in Mobile, Ala., last month. His memoir went on sale in bookstores today.
Those claims have been questioned by British parliamentarian Kim Howells, the former head of the House of Commons' intelligence and security committee. He told BBC Radio that while there had been and still were "real plots," he wasn't "convinced" that waterboarding had provided information that was "instrumental in preventing these plots coming to fruition and murdering people".
The former president, though, is a firm believer in this controversial practice. When the Times asked if he had authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the al-Qaida leader who plotted the 9/11 attacks -- Bush said, "Damn right! We capture the guy, the chief operating officer of al-Qaida, who kills 3,000 people. We felt he had the information about another attack.
"He says, 'I'll talk to you when I get my lawyer.' I say, 'What options are available and legal?'"
In a separate interview with NBC's Today program, the 53rd president said he was assured that the technique was compatible with U.S. and international law. "The lawyer said it was legal," Bush explained. "He said it did not fall within the anti-torture act. I'm not a lawyer. But you gotta trust the judgment of people around you, and I do." Asked by NBC interviewer Matt Lauer if it would by legal for another country to waterboard a captured American soldier, Bush replied, "All I ask is that people read the book."
The former president doesn't deal with that moral quandary in "Decision Points," but he does explain why he believes waterboarding is a vital weapon in the war on terror. He writes that al-Qaida member Abu Zubaydah -- who was suspected of plotting an attack on Los Angeles International Airport when he was captured in Pakistan in 2002 -- talked after being waterboarded as "his understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then co-operate."
While Bush may be confident of the value and legality of waterboarding -- which his administration called an "enhanced interrogation technique" -- others are certain that it is an ineffective form of torture that's illegal under the Geneva Conventions. (The U.S. signed the treaty in 1955). President Barack Obama has outlawed the practice, and said that the U.S. is no safer as a result of waterboarding or any other type of torture. And the British government today confirmed that it agreed with Obama's position. "It comes under [the Geneva Conventions'] definition [of torture] in our view," a spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron told The Guardian newspaper.
David Davis, a member of Britain's ruling Conservative Party and an outspoken human rights defender, told the BBC that as well as being incompatible with Western values, waterboarding didn't produce reliable confessions. "People under torture tell you what you want to hear," he said, noting that much of the false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction ahead of the Iraq war was obtained through torture and illegal rendition. "Apart from being immoral, apart from destroying our standing in the world ... it doesn't deliver."