The decision to waterboard al-Qaida prisoners in 2002 was made by CIA managers and government lawyers, and was not initially approved by President George W. Bush, according to a new account by a former CIA lawyer that revises the history of America's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A memoir by John Rizzo, longtime acting general counsel for the CIA, says Bush was not initially informed about the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques that critics later called torture, despite Bush's claim to the contrary in his 2010 book....