by BarbinMD
Dick Cheney has crawled out from under whatever rock serves as his latest undisclosed
location:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said in a statement Tuesday that the Obama administration's decision to name a prosecutor to look into Bush-era interrogations of suspected terrorists should foster "doubts about this administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security."
"The people involved deserve our gratitude," Cheney said. "They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."
Leaving aside his standard fear-mongering tactic, we can all appreciate why Cheney would oppose any
criminal investigations into the use of torture techniques while he was in office -- after all, the smoking gun would have his fingerprints all over it.
By Zachary Roth - August 25, 2009
It's hardly news that Dick Cheney isn't likely to win any prizes for honesty any time soon. But yesterday offered yet another exhibit in the case.
During the debate over torture this spring, Cheney
claimed that CIA memos, which he had asked to be declassified, would prove that torture proved effective in obtaining actionable intelligence.
Well, yesterday, those memos were released, along with the CIA inspector general's report. And, surprise surprise, they don't begin to show what Cheney said they did.
The memos, from 2004 and 2005,
do say that some detainees, particularly Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, gave up useful information during debriefing sessions. But nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture.
Indeed, as Spencer Ackerman of the
Washington Independent shows, most of the evidence suggests they came through traditional interrogation techniques. As Spencer puts it: "Cheney's public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don't."
It's no wonder that in his
response to the memos' release, Cheney is reduced to playing silly semantic games that a reasonably intelligent junior high-schooler could see through. "The documents released Monday," said Cheney in a statement, "clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda." That's true, but it's totally different from Cheney's earlier claim -- that the documents would show it was the EITs themselves that elicited the information.
Human rights organizations are making similar points. Gitanjali Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights said the documents "don't make the case for torture, they only show that the CIA is able to tailor documents to justify its actions after the fact." And Tom Parker of Amnesty International added that the memos "are hardly the slam dunk we had been led to expect. There is little or no supporting evidence in either memo to give substance to the specific claims about impending attacks made by Khalid Shaik Mohammed in highly coercive circumstances."
moreUpdated to add:
Morning Joe Defends Bush/Torture. The GOP is scared, and for good reason So, the GOP will cry, lie, twist the truth, demonize, play the victim, call it a witch hunt, call us fascists, whatever. It is nothing we haven't seen before, so we should not be surprised.
But they are scared, very scared, and for good reason.
If they were not afraid, that would be a reason for concern.
But they are not. Already the Right Wing Noise Machine is on the defensive. That is great for us, as Democrats and as believers in the Rule of Law, but it doesn't mean our job is done. Not by a long shot.
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