Brits Reject Bush Claim Waterboarding Saved UK Lives

A key part of George w. Bush's new autobiography is his admission that, while President, he committed the war crime of authorizing waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.   Long settled American law holds that waterboarding is torture and, as such, a criminal act.

To justify his war crime Bush made the claim that information tortured out of these suspects,  "helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."

According to The Guardian, British officials say there is no evidence to support Bush's claims that waterboarding saved the lives of any Britons.

" It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction."

Oopsie!   If you're going to confess to a war crime and then seek to justify it, you really need to have your facts straight.   Don't try to justify it with things that happened a month before the crimes were actually commenced.   But wait, there's more.

Der Spiegel reports that former German chancellor, Gerhard Shroder, has come right out and accused George of deliberately lying.

" In his memoirs, called "Decision Points" and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.


On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
.
"Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq ... prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US," Shröder said. "This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed."

Oh, my goodness, there goes another of Bush's balloons shot down - his claim that he had no idea his intelligence on Iraq was flat out wrong.   Of course it was wrong, it was "false and constructed."   That's constructed as in plainly made up.