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\u2019t in the loop when it came to waterboarding.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s war on terror. He recounts his experience with the CIA in a soon-to-be-released memoir, Company Man, and the New Yorker\u2019s Steve Coll says in a\u00a0book review<\/a>\u00a0published on Thursday this week that a preview copy contains accusations about Mr. Bush and his presidency\u2019s torture program that have not been made before now.<\/p>\n According to Coll, Rizzo\u2019s 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\u2019s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t 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,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Coll wrote.\u00a0\u201cRizzo provides an eyewitness account of how the early brutal interrogation sessions were described in detail to President George W. Bush\u2019s leading national-security advisers in the Situation Room.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n