Dick Cheney is still upset at the Obama administration’s decision to stop using some of the overt torture techniques pioneered by the previous administration:
On Sunday, Cheney said he remains concerned that the Obama administration has stopped using some of the techniques first instituted during the Bush years.
“I’m still concerned about the fact that a lot of the techniques that we have used to keep the country safe for seven years are no longer available, that they’ve been sort of taken off the table,” Cheney said. “It’s not clear to me today if we still have an interrogation program to put someone through.”
Cheney said the Obama administration should be willing to use waterboarding and other enhanced techniques.
“I would advocate it,” Cheney said. “I would be a strong supporter of it.”
In the same article, a senior White House adviser obliquely responded to the claim made by some pundits on the right that torture committed under George W. Bush helped in gathering the intelligence that led to the assassination of Obama bin Laden:
But White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” said the administration would not reconsider its prohibition on waterboarding.
Donilon, who appeared on four different Sunday shows, said a range of intelligence-gathering measures led to the successful mission, and that no single technique, such as waterboarding, was a determining factor.
“An operation like this is the result of hundreds of pieces of information and intelligence over time,” Donilon said on “Fox News Sunday.”
That’s not good enough, though. As Cheney pointed out, it isn’t even possible to interrogate prisoners without waterboarding, mock executions, and hanging people by their wrists from hooks in the ceiling. And he isn’t the only one saying this. John Yoo totally has Cheney’s back on this one:
John Yoo says President Obama is too afraid of the politics of Guantanamo Bay to capture and interrogate terrorists.
The former George W. Bush administration lawyer, Yoo wrote the infamous torture memos used to justify the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were a central legacy of Bush’s Global War On Terror. He now says that the killing of Osama bin Laden will go down in history as one of President Obama’s biggest national security fails.
Yoo told CNN on Thursday night that the special forces team sent to kill bin Laden should have instead taken him alive and kept him as a source of future intelligence. Failing to do that, Yoo says, cost the U.S. a valuable asset. That was a mistake, Yoo says.
“If they were going in with no options other than to kill him, then that’s a problem,” Yoo told CNN’s Eliot Spitzer.[…]
Yoo told Spitzer “that a deliberately small force was sent in” to Abbottabad, Pakistan by the White House because “they don’t want to capture high-level al Qaeda leaders.”Why? As Yoo said in his op-ed, the administration is terrified of backing the Bush administration’s moves in the war on terror.
“Capturing [bin Laden] alive would have required the administration to hold and interrogate bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay,” Yoo wrote, “something that has given this president allergic reactions bordering on a seizure.”
You can see how weird that would be from Yoo’s point of view — Pres. Obama having seizure-inducing allergic reactions to an experience that gives John Yoo multiple orgasms.
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