And so here it is: the final confirmation of something we’ve long known – the Bush administration’s apparently enthusiastic embrace of torture. George W Bush’s memoir (£) is merely the final confirmation of this. No-one need trouble themselves pretending that the United States does not torture (at least some of) its prisoners. Nor is there any need to dance daintily around the question of what is and what is not torture. Not when the former President of the United States boasts about it. Should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be waterboarded? “Damn right” says President George W Bush.
They knew they were torturing prisoners and they didn’t care. Indeed, that was the point of the exercise. According to Bush:
Waterboarding, he says, was “tough” but the fact that it was used on, we’re told, just a handful of prisoners is itself an indication that it’s both torture and an unreliable way of producing reliable information.Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded.
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