British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush’s claims. They said Mohammed provided “extremely valuable” information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida’s structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed’s waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.

Kim Howells, former chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee and Labour foreign minister, told the BBC that, while he did not doubt the existence of plots, he doubted whether waterboarding provided information instrumental in preventing them coming to fruition.

It sounds like a little bit of plausible deniability. They were happy to have the useful information but they can’t legally accept intelligence gathered through waterboarding. Of course there’s no way to be sure that the plots would have been successful so it’s really a debate over hypothetical situations. The truth is probably somewhere in between but I tend to lean a little more towards our President than British politicians in this case.