Former United States President George W. Bush has defended the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques against accused terrorists, but a lawyer from his administration says the two-term leader wasn’t in the loop when it came to waterboarding.
John Rizzo worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years, including a stint under then-President George W. Bush during the dawn of America’s war on terror. He recounts his experience with the CIA in a soon-to-be-released memoir, Company Man, and the New Yorker’s Steve Coll says in a book review published on Thursday this week that a preview copy contains accusations about Mr. Bush and his presidency’s torture program that have not been made before now.
According to Coll, Rizzo’s book contains allegations that Bush was absent from confidential national security meetings in 2002 and 2003 in which the president would have been briefed on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs.
“We don’t yet have a reliable or full chronology of the use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques in CIA prisons, but we do know that, beginning in the summer of 2002, several senior Al-Qaeda prisoners were waterboarded or subjected to extensive sleep deprivation, or both, in an effort to extract intelligence from them about future plots,” Coll wrote. “Rizzo provides an eyewitness account of how the early brutal interrogation sessions were described in detail to President George W. Bush’s leading national-security advisers in the Situation Room.”