Jeb Bush has come under fire from human rights groups after declining to rule out the US resuming the use of torture if he became president.

“[Bush is] wrong, and he’s perpetuating a myth that torture works,” said Sarah Dougherty, a senior fellow at Physicians for Human Rights. “We have a very large, thoroughly exhaustive research report saying that torture did not work.”

Speaking to Iowa Republicans on Thursday, the presidential candidate said in general he believed torture was inappropriate and praised his brother, former president George W Bush, for largely ending the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office.

But he went on to say that some harsh questioning methods might be necessary in extreme circumstances.

“I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush said when he was asked whether he would keep in place or repeal Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA.

A Senate report released in 2014 cited CIA records in concluding that the techniques were more brutal than previously disclosed, that the CIA lied about them, and that they failed to produce unique, life-saving intelligence. The CIA and its defenders take issue with the report.



Bush said he believed the techniques were effective in producing intelligence but that “now we’re in a different environment”. He suggested there may be occasions when brutal interrogations were called for to keep the country safe.

“That’s why I’m not saying in every condition, under every possible scenario,” Bush said.

Later Bush said there was a difference between enhanced interrogation and torture but declined to be specific. “I don’t know. I’m just saying if I’m going to be president of the United States, you take this threat seriously.”

“It’s not really about Bush,” said Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International’s US security and human rights program. “It’s about the entire political culture of the US, where tolerating torture is unfortunately the norm.”

Earlier this month, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said waterboarding “doesn’t sound very severe” compared with the barbarism of Isis. Shah said such comments played into a common misconception that torture was sometimes necessary, and that it worked.

“Our general feeling about Bush and Trump’s remarks are that they actually represent a much bigger problem of how, instead of acknowledging the pain and suffering of torture, too many talk about it as though it’s legal – which is totally bizarre,” she said.

Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch said that Bush’s statement was “problematic”.

“Part of the reason why people can say things like this is because this administration hasn’t been clear that the conduct was illegal,” she said, as opposed to “wrong and ineffective”.

Shah said the US government led the fight against torture throughout the 20th century, and that to talk about it now as though it might be legal was “a huge step backward”.

“They’re ignoring the reality, even as we know so much more now. Right as we’re learning about the brutality, US political figures are taking pains to excuse torture,” Shah said.

Pitter said she believed that those who created the program and carried it out should be prosecuted.



“There’s a substantial amount of evidence that they are guilty of a conspiracy to torture,” Pitter said. “They knew what they were doing was a violation of the law before they even sought the authorization from the office of legal counsel. There’s evidence in the Senate torture report of that.”

She said she also believed that the “enormous amount” of people who went beyond what was authorized and forced detainees to “engage in rectal feedings”, subjected them to “water torture”, and forced them “to stand on broken bones” should be punished.

Dougherty of Physicians for Human Rights, a group that uses medicine and science to call attention to human rights violations, said the release of the Senate torture report should push presidential candidates to consider what the US government could do to strengthen prohibitions against torture. They shouldn’t, Dougherty said, argue that torture is permissible.

“As a democracy founded on the rule of the law, torture is a crime. It is really appalling for him to be discussing it as a policy option,” she said.

As president, Bush or any other successor to Barack Obama would be unimpeded in an attempt to reinstate of torture. Obama banned CIA torture by executive order in January 2009. To the chagrin of human rights campaigners, the ban has no force of law, and can be overturned by a successor at whim. After political momentum resulting from the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into CIA torture, the Senate passed a measure to codify the torture ban into law, but it has not passed the House.

The Associated Press contributed to this report