Former Vice President Dick Cheney issued a statement today that is yet one more chapter in the ongoing battle of Cheney versus the Obama Administration — and precision accuracy — again.
The issue: the administration’s decision to appoint a Special Prospector to look into specific allegations of torture under the Bush administration. The second issue: the release of CIA info which Cheney is suggesting completely vindicates him…which others say really does not. The third issue: Cheney’s ongoing claim that the Obama administration is weak and doesn’t really care about making the country safe, part of the “vote for us or die” insinuation that Cheney and a part of the Republican party used in political campaigns against Democrats in general.
CNN reports:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is again taking aim at President Obama, issuing a statement Monday suggesting the administration’s decision to name a prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogations under President Bush fuels “doubts about this administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.”
“The people involved deserve our gratitude,” Cheney said in the statement. “They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions.”
The former vice president also said documents released Monday prove enhanced interrogation techniques yieled valuable information that “provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda”
“This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks,” Cheney said. “These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002.”
“The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States,” he added.
Note the timing:Late Monday, the government released declassified CIA documents originally requested last May by Cheney. The former vice president had argued they would show enhanced interrogation techniques saved lives.
While analysis in the documents says information from detainee interrogations “helped thwart a number of al-Qaida plots” and “arrests…disrupted attack plans in progress,” it remains unclear from the heavily redacted documents whether that information was obtained through the enhanced interrogation techniques Cheney defends.
The details of some of the apparently terrorist plans on tap are horrific indeed — but Cheney’s claim that all of this vindicates the use of tactics that have now come to light such as holding a drill to someone’s head, knocking them out with a sleeper hold or threatening to kill their kids is reportedly NOT vindicated by the actual material that has come out so far.
ABC News also suggests that the documents are not a vindication of Cheney’s claims as the Veep suggests and as, most assuredly, Rush Limbaugh, conservative talkers and that segment of the GOP which is part of the talk radio political culture will claim:
The CIA released the documents today that former Vice President Dick Cheney requested earlier this year in an attempt to prove his assertion that using enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees saved U.S. lives.
The documents back up the Bush administration’s claims that intelligence gleaned from captured terror suspects had thwarted terrorist attacks, but the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.
The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman is more definitive after his paper examined the documents:
For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program….
Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.
The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part…
He offers a lot more, then writes:
Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. 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.
In a statement, Tom Parker, the policy director of Amnesty International’s American branch, said, “Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Vice President Cheney’s track record, the two CIA memos released today 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 Khaled Shaik Mohammed in highly coercive circumstances.”
On a slew of issues (such as a little thing called the Iraq war in terms of weapons of mass destruction and its supposedly piece-of-cake aftermath) Cheney has proven to be someone whose comments are often… at variance…with what later come to be known to be the facts. Most likely, the more info that comes out via the CIA and via future historians, the more likely it is that he will go down in history as one of the country’s most powerful, out-of-control and polarizing Vice Presidents.
Patrick Appel, writing on Andrew Sullivan’s site, adds:
The documents released yesterday prove nothing about torture’s effectiveness, but Cheney is claiming victory. I guess after “death panels” reality is whatever you make it. This reminds me of a line from Mark Danner’s speech from 2007 on the reality that the Bush administration encased itself in.
But that is the new modus operendi, isn’t it?
Want to insist Obama is not an American citizen, saying it’s so and demanding endless proof and ignoring anything that undermines that assertion makes it so.
Want to insist healthcare reform included sinister, evil death panels that would kill your granny? Just say it over and over and ignore evidence to the contrary — or dismiss it as “nuance” which usually means: “Details, schmetails. I’ll keep saying it and no matter what you say or hold out to me will not change my mind.”
So, to Cheney, and to those into the talk radio political culture, this will be a big victory. (“Details, schmetails..”)
FOOTNOTE: There is the possibility that in future years the edited out material will prove Cheney correct. But so far Cheney has proven to be to accuracy what a nice, big banana split is to dieting.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.