George W. Bush defended the use of waterboarding in his interview with Matt Lauer, offering an objectively weak defense of its legality:
BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda… ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows.” And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."
BUSH: Yeah.
The "when John Yoo says it's legal" standard reaches past the nether realms of Nixonian lawlessness. I suppose we're just lucky Bush didn't decide that in addition to torturing people, he wanted to unilaterally suspend the First and Fourth Amendment.
The section of Bush's autobiography, Decision Points, justifying the waterboarding of Abu Zubayda, appears to have been ghostwritten/inspired by former Bush speech writer and torture aficionado Marc Thiessen:
LAUER: You talk about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. There's another guy you write about in the book, Abu Zabeta, another high profile terror suspect. He was waterboarded. By the way, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, according to most reports, 183 times. This guy was waterboarded more than 80 times. And you explain that his understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation up to a certain point and waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold and fulfill his religious duty and then cooperate. And you have a quote from him. "You must do this for all the brothers." End quote.
BUSH: Yeah. Isn't that interesting?
LAUER: Abu Zabeta really went to someone and said, "You should waterboard all the brothers?
BUSH: He didn't say that. He said, "You should give brothers the chance to be able to fulfill their duty." I don't recall him saying you should water -- I think it's -- I think it's an assumption in your case.
LAUER: Yeah, I -- when "You must do this for --"
BUSH: But…
LAUER: …"All the brothers." So to let them get to that threshold?
BUSH: Yeah, that's what-- that's how I interpreted. I -- look, first of all we used this technique on three people. Captured a lot of people and used it on three. We gained value -- information to protect the country. And it was the right thing to do as far as I'm concerned.
I love that Lauer says "according to most reports," which means he has never actually set eyes on the torture memo that Marcy Wheeler discovered reveals how many times KSM and Zubayda were waterboarded.
Zubayda was reportedly driven insane by his treatment, so the only reason for including that statement is to justify the torture of suspected terror detainees on the basis that they're Muslim. Bush at least appears to be uncomfortable enough with the implication of the argument he's borrowing from Thiessen that he wants to avoid talking about it very much. According to The Washington Post, "not a single significant plot was foiled" from Zubayda's torturous interrogation, and in fact the government "spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms."
As for whether or not torture was necessary, torture defenders can only rely on conjecture. The CIA inspector general's report found that "the effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured." At least one of the specific claims in the book Bush makes about waterboarding preventing an attack in London is being disputed by a British official.
There's something genuinely surreal about a president of the United States defending the use of torture techniques borrowed from Chinese communists who were trying to elicit false confessions. Bush's defense hinges, as torture defenses always do, on the paradoxical argument that waterboarding isn't torture but that inflicting pain was a necessary part of interrogation. That's because the logical conclusion of that argument is even if we aren't torturing people, we should be, which in most humans, even defenders of Bush's torture regime, elicits a natural moral revulsion, which could be avoided by simply refusing to rationalize the use of torture in the first place.
