In a recent speech to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, former President George W. Bush confessed to ordering the torture of a suspect in the 9/11 attacks.

“Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Bush said of the man to whom The Grand Rapids Press referred as the terrorist who master-minded the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Bush went on to say that the event shaped his presidency and convinced him that the nation was in a war against terror.

To contradict Mr. Bush, his Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil said in the book The Price of Loyalty that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were planned from the first National Security Council meeting after the inauguration, obviously months before 9/11.

Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote The Price of Liberty, a book about Mr. O’Neil’s time with the Bush administration.