British public opinion just doesn't matter: George Bush defends waterboarding as he claims 'torture' stopped attacks on London

Bush: 'It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England'

Former president praises Tony Blair as his closest ally



Bush dismissive about UK public opinion about the Iraq war

David Davis MP: We're more effective by using brains, not brutality

Former Labour Minister rejects claim 'torture' protected UK from attack



Bush drew up plan for strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities



America's use of waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists saved British lives by stopping attacks on Heathrow and Canary Wharf, George W Bush claims in a new book.

In his memoirs, the former U.S. president defended the technique, rejected by the British government as torture.

In an interview today, Mr Bush also praises Tony Blair as his closest ally but is dismissive about British public opinion about the war in Iraq.

Ending two years of public silence since he left the White House, Mr Bush said three suspects were waterboarded to provide information about the plots.

Playing to the crowd: Former President George W. Bush waves as he signs copies of his book Decision Points in Dallas today

‘Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic families abroad, Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States,’ he writes in Decision Points, published in the U.S. today.

Mr Bush also claims in the book that he ordered a plan to be drawn up for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

He admits that he authorised the use of waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the September 11 attacks, calling his decision ‘damn right’.

He writes: ‘We capture the guy, the chief operating officer of Al Qaeda, who kills 3,000 people. We felt he had information about another attack.

Delivering a message: Demonstrators carrying signs walk towards the Dalllas bookstore where former President George W. Bush iwas holding a signing today

‘He says, “I’ll talk to you when I get my lawyer.” I say, “What options are available and legal?”... As president your job is to protect your country.’

Last month Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6, said in a speech that his service had ‘nothing whatsoever’ to do with torture, which he described as ‘illegal and abhorrent’.

But he was more vague about using information obtained by allies from such means, adding that the service ‘had a duty’ to act on such information if it ‘might save lives’.

Decision points: Mr Bush’s 497-page memoirs



British MPs today doubted Mr Bush's claims that waterboarding saved British lives. Former Labour minister Kim Howells said the former president was wrong: 'Where I doubt what President Bush has said is that what we regard as torture, waterboarding, actually produced information which was instrumental in preventing those plots coming to fruition and murdering people'.



Tory MP David Davis said he had recently had a conversation with a former head of M16 who was 'furious' about the use of waterboarding: 'He said we never learn this lesson. In the second world war the British intelligence services didn't use torture, the Gestapo did. The Gestapo got some information, but lots of wrong information. We were much, much more effective by using brains, not brutality. Even the Americans now recognise that', Mr Davis said.



Mr Bush’s 497-page memoirs, backed by a series of high-profile U.S. television interviews this week, have been seen as a belated attempt to rehabilitate his tarnished presidency by explaining some of his most controversial decisions.

He claims that he was a ‘dissenting voice’ opposing colleagues who wanted to invade Iraq in 2003, although he stands by his decision to oust Saddam Hussein.

And he said he offered Tony Blair the opportunity to back out of the invasion to save the prime minister’s political position at home, but Mr Blair refused.



In an interview in The Times today, Mr Bush praised Mr Blair as his closest ally but was dismissive about British public opinion about the war in Iraq.

Candid: Former U.S. president George W. Bush opens up in an interview to be screened tonight with MSNBC's Matt Lauer

‘It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn’t matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn’t matter then,’ he said .

Mr Bush recalled how when Mr Blair faced a possible vote of no confidence in Parliament on the eve of war, he offered him the chance to opt out of sending British troops into Iraq.

He said that 'rather than lose the government, I would much rather have Tony and his wisdom and his strategic thinking as the prime minister of a strong and important ally'.

However, Mr Blair told him: 'I'm in. If it costs the government, fine.'

He added that he was appalled to discover that intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction had proved wrong.

‘The reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false,’ he writes.

Grave news: The moment a White House aide informs George W Bush about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center

‘No-one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons.



‘I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it.



‘I still do.’

Although there were ‘things we got wrong in Iraq’, the objective of removing Saddam was ‘eternally right’, he writes. On Iran, he says: ‘I directed the Pentagon to study what would be necessary for a strike.



‘This would be to stop the bomb clock, at least temporarily.’

He said that he also considered mounting an air strike or a covert raid on a secret Syrian nuclear facility, but the Pentagon and the CIA concluded it was ‘too risky’.

Recalling his reaction after the September 11 hijackers flew a plane into the Pentagon, he writes: ‘My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.’

Let's shake on it: George W. Bush and Tony Blair shake hands after a joint press conference in 2001

Other claims in the book include that Dick Cheney, Mr Bush’s deeply divisive vice-president, suggested the president drop him from his 2004 re-election campaign to quell accusations that he ran the presidency.

Mr Bush also admits that it took ‘too long’ for the government to react to the disaster in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

He said being accused of racism in the aftermath was the ‘worst moment’ of his presidency.

The waterboarding torture technique provokes a sensation of drowning. It involves wrapping plastic or fabric around a detainee’s face before pouring water over the top until it is forced up the nose and down the throat.

Critics say it can result in long-lasting psychological damage, injury to the lungs and even in extreme cases death.

Earlier this year, Mr Bush’s former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove – known as the president’s ‘brain’ – said he did not believe that the interrogation method amounted to torture.



‘I am proud that we kept the world safer than it was by the use of these techniques,’ he said.

‘Every one of the people who were waterboarded had a doctor who had to ascertain that there had been no long-lasting physical or mental damage to the individual.’

How mother's foetus trauma turned Dubya against abortion

George Bush revealed how one of the most traumatic events of his life shaped his anti-abortion stance, writes Tom Leonard.

Breaking his silence on his early life, his heavy drinking and his years in the White House, the former president told how deeply a miscarriage his mother suffered when he was a teenager has affected his thinking.

Barbara Bush, who would go on to become First Lady when Mr Bush’s father became president in 1989, had the miscarriage at home in Texas.



Distraught, she put the dead foetus in a glass jar so she could take it to hospital.

Mr Bush recalled: ‘She said to her teenage kid, “Here’s the foetus”,’ and gestured as if he was brandishing the jar.’

Family ties: Barbara Bush, flanked by her son and husband, addresses a rally in New Hampshire in 2000

Bush told TV interviewer Matt Lauer that his pro-life stance was cemented by the experience. ‘There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life.’

In his autobiography, Mr Bush describes how he had to drive his mother to hospital, and writes: ‘I never expected to see the remains of the foetus, which she had saved in a jar. There was a human life, a little brother or sister.’

He says he included the episode in his book not to brandish his anti-abortion credentials but to ‘show how my mom and I developed a relationship’.

Mr Bush, 64, has barely spoken publicly in the two years since he was turfed out of the White House by Barack Obama, weighed down by the worst approval ratings since President Nixon.



But as Mr Obama struggles to pin all the blame for the U.S.’s economic woes on his predecessor, political commentators believe this may be the moment for Mr Bush to salvage some of his reputation.



His book, Decision Points, tackles some of the biggest crises his life, from the drinking to the decision to go to war in Iraq.

The boy who became President: George Bush in a 1963 High School yearbook photo from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts

Published in the U.S. today, the memoir is surprisingly candid from the start. The opening chapter, called Quitting, tackles his battle with alcohol.



Mr Bush said his drinking was so bad that he questioned whether he loved alcohol more than he loved his wife, Laura.

Realising that he had an addictive personality, he stopped drinking after waking up ‘drunk as a skunk’ the morning after his 40th birthday party.

With the help of his wife and the evangelist Billy Graham, he embarked on a ‘one-step’ programme whose success, he says, started him on the path to the presidency.



He told NBC that he stopped drinking in 1986 and that – despite rumours to the contrary – he has never even thought about having a drink since.

‘When I go to church, if there’s a wine in the communion, I don’t take the wine in the communion.’



Drinking became ‘a love, and therefore began to compete for my love with my wife and my daughters’, he said.

He says he was never a ‘chemically addicted’ alcoholic, but the anecdotes make clear he had a serious problem.

Describing a particularly embarrassing moment from his drinking days, he recalled: ‘I’m drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad’s house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura’s there.

‘And I’m sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad’s. And I said to her out loud, “What is sex like after 50?”.’



Other guests looked ‘serious daggers’ at him but, years later after he had reached the half century, the woman sent him a note which read, ‘Well, George, how is it?’

Mr Bush went on to question how much a president should worry about being popular.

Poll Can waterboarding ever be justified? Yes No Can waterboarding ever be justified? Yes 16790 votes

No 11858 votes Now share your opinion





‘If you chase popularity, you are chasing a moment. You are chasing a puff of air,’ he said in the interview.



He also reveals personal details of relationship with Tony Blair and his family.

Biographies of Mr Blair have revealed how his wife Cherie once attacked Mr Bush over the death penalty during a dinner at Chequers.



In his book, Mr Bush offers his own take on the set-to, claiming that the prime minister ‘looked a little uncomfortable’ while Euan, the Blairs’ eldest son, was overheard telling her, ‘Give the man a break, mother’.

As for Mr Bush’s long-term legacy, he says he believes it will be decades before his presidency can really be judged, writing: ‘I’m comfortable with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it.’

