George Bush’s Decision Points: what they’re saying

Downing Street has reasserted its belief that waterboarding is torture after George Bush used his memoir to defend the use of the technique to interrogate suspected terrorists.

"We don't condone [torture], nor do we ask others to do it on our behalf," a spokesperson for Number 10 told the BBC after Bush claimed that waterboarding had exposed plots to attack Canary Wharf, Heathrow and multiple targets in the United States.

In interviews with NBC TV and the Times to mark the publication of Decision Points, Bush said that three people were waterboarded - a technique which he adamantly denies is torture.

Asked if captured al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded, Bush said: "Damn right!"

"We capture the guy, the chief operating officer of al-Qaeda, who kills 3,000 people. We felt he had the information about another attack. He says: 'I'll talk to you when I get my lawyer.' I say: 'What options are available and legal?'"

The former president also takes time to praise Tony Blair, who he compares to Winston Churchill. Bush says he was prepared to let Blair off taking Britain into the Iraq war because he feared losing a key ally if the government fell.

Not much about Bush's book is likely to endear him to the British public, least of all his assertion that it never mattered what they thought of him: "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then."

Despite this, Bush says the special relationship between Britain and the US was "definitely special during my presidency".

WHAT THEY’RE SAYINGOn WaterboardingGeoffrey Robertson QC, on Channel 4 News: "Technically in the countries that have ratified the torture convention, which places an obligation on them in relation to people suspected of ordering torture... he may face problems. Under the diplomatic privileges act he could come [to the UK] as an ambassador perhaps and obtain immunity, but that it is a matter that would severely test the Foreign Office were he to come and see his friend Mr Blair."

Steve Ballinger, Amnesty: "We have said since these reports [of waterboarding] originally emerged that there needed to be a proper investigation. We thought it might have happened under Obama but it hasn't. We hoped an investigation would have looked at all aspects of how the waterboarding was run, who was subjected to it, who was running it, and what information was found as a result of it. Instead we have some random, pretty evidently self-serving comments from a former president."

Kim Howells, former chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I don't think there was any doubt there were real plots. Where I doubt what Bush has said is that what we regard as torture actually produced information which was instrumental in preventing those plots coming to fruition. [Bush] needs to justify what he did to the world."

David Davies, former shadow home secretary on BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "He talks about being mortified about what he termed the false intelligence that led to the war in Iraq. You know where that false intelligence came from? It came from the torture of [Libyan al-Qaeda member Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi. That's the problem with torture: people tell you what they want to hear."

On iraqShaker Kitab, Iraqiya party spokesman in the Times: "He destroyed Iraq and the people of Iraq... he should have supported the opposition. Entering the country with a gigantic army, he brought down not only the regime, but also the Iraqi economy and Iraqi society."

on BUSH
Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg: "Presidents get the memoirs they deserve. In Decision Points George W. Bush writes about his two terms in office much as he lived them - somewhat offhandedly, almost as if he's writing about someone else."

Mehdi Hasan, New Statesman: "And even 'today', with the benefit of hindsight, the suggestion from a rapper that he might be a 'racist' is considered by Dubya as 'the worst moment' of his presidency; not the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; not the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001, which killed 3,000 people on American soil; not the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison; not the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct result of his so-called wars of liberation. Words fail me."

Michael Tomasky, the Guardian: "The most partisan president in modern American history can't just tell us that's not really who he is and not who he meant to be. He needs to show it."

Tim Rutten, LA Times: "The man and the president portrayed in these pages is, at the same time, passive and strong; intelligent but not curious; a public person apparently at his best in private; willing to admit shortcomings, but not particularly self-critical; unfailingly civil himself, but happily surrounded by bare-knuckle partisans. There is a kind of pragmatic courage that makes a leader fearless of contradictions. Bush, for his part, seems oblivious to them."

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post:  "It will not be surprising if, when the passions of the present day have faded and history has a chance to examine the Bush presidency, his efforts to improve immigration laws and cut through trade barriers are recognised as among its most laudable aspects."

Michiko Kakutani, NY Times: "Certainly it's the most casual of presidential memoirs: how many works in the genre start as a sort of evangelical, 12-step confession ('Could I continue to grow closer to the Almighty or was alcohol becoming my god?'), include some off-color jokes and conclude with an aside about dog poop? Despite the eagerness of Mr. Bush to portray himself as a forward-leaning, resolute leader, this volume sometimes has the effect of showing the former president as both oddly passive and strangely cavalier."

On the financial crisisJeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph: "Both the foreign affairs and economic policy record speak for themselves – they were in almost every respect utterly disastrous. Nothing good came out of the Bush presidency in economic terms. Only President Bush himself seems blind to this textbook study in economic failure. Not since Herbert Hoover, the man who presided over the Great Crash and its immediate aftermath, has a US president fallen victim to such delusion." ·