Washington, November 10: Former US President George W. Bush has come under intense grilling over his defense of torture techniques including “waterboarding” against detainees held in US prisons.
In an interview on NBC on Monday, Bush defended his decision to authorize waterboarding — a form of torture that simulates drowning — to interrogate terror suspects, claiming the method had helped prevent terrorist attacks in Britain and the United States.
He made the remarks following the release of his memoir titled “Decision Points,” in which he has emphasized that “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.”
Meanwhile, former Labour party chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee, Kim Howells, cast doubt over Bush’s claims and further pinned the bulk of the blame on the US administration.
“We think waterboarding is torture and I don’t believe that the British security services people had anything to do with it,” AFP quoted Howells as saying on Tuesday.
The remarks have triggered widespread condemnation from human rights activists, with Steve Ballinger, of the Amnesty International saying, “George Bush is wrong to say waterboarding is justified because torture is illegal under international law.”
The National Council for Civil Liberties in the UK also fulminated against Bush’s defense of controversial torture techniques.
“After the atrocity of 9/11, the American president could have united the world against terrorism and towards the rule of law,” said Shami Chakrabarti of the group.
“Instead, President Bush led a great democracy into the swamp of lies, war and torture in freedom’s name,” Chakrabarti added.
“Democracy can do better and, learning from the past, it will,” he asserted.
Bush’s comments have turned the spotlight on the ongoing practices and methods used in the US prisons camp at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where terror suspects are held in captivity without a fair trial.
———Agencies