Former president George W. Bush is causing
yet more controversy, this time with his memoirs. Bush writes that a practice
called “Waterboarding” saved the lives of British and American citizens by
preventing terrorism, and aiding in the collection of information from suspected
Al Qaida operatives. The problem is that this practice has been condemned by
London’s Downing Street as Torture. Bush claims that the practice extracted
vital information from suspects regarding planned attacks on London’s Canary
Wharf and Heathrow Airport. It was also used on suspected 9/11 mastermind
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In his memoirs the president writes that the use of
waterboarding by the CIA and British Intelligence prevented attacks because
“Their 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.”
British officials are distancing themselves from Bush’s claims, saying
that while Mohammed in particular provided key information in preventing
attacks, they were unaware that this knowledge was extracted through torture.
The head of MI5, Eliza Mannigham-Buller says that America concealed the fact
that Mohammed had been tortured from British Intel. Officials say that to this
day, the US has not revealed the details of Mohammed’s time in US custody. This
isn’t the only inconsistency between the book and what officials are saying now
either. Bush claimed that Abu Zubaydah who was waterboarded in 2002 after being
taken into custody by US officials, confessed to an Al Qaida and Sadaam Hussein
were linked, and had a plot to attack Washington DC with “a dirty bomb”. This
report has however been proven false.
Geoffry Robinson GQ, a human rights lawyer, claims that Bush could have landed himself in some serious hot water by confessing to the use of torture on prisoners: “George W Bush has confessed to ordering waterboarding, which in the view of almost all experts clearly passes the severe pain threshold in the definition of torture in international law.”
