By Jason Leopold
Former Vice President Dick Cheney challenged President Obama Monday to release top-secret CIA memos that allegedly states the torture of prisoners was an intelligence “success.” Last December, Cheney admitted in numerous interviews before he left office that he personally approved the waterboarding of three “high-value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners.
In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Cheney defended the Bush administration’s torture program and claimed that it saved American lives. He criticized Obama’s decision to release four “torture”memos last week because Obama “didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort.”
“There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” Cheney said. “They have not been declassified. I formally asked that they be declassified now.
“I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.
“And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was. If we’re going to have this debate, let’s have an honest debate.”
Neither a spokesman for the White House nor the CIA returned calls for comment.
Cheney has been a vocal critic of Obama’s decision to outlaw torture and shut down Guantanamo Bay. Cheney told CNN last month that Obama’s policy directives has made the country “less safe” and vulnerable to attack. In February, he told Politico that Obama’s policies could result in a nuclear attack on U.S. soil.
Much of his criticism is related to Obama’s decision to end the Bush administration’s torture program.
Still, that has stopped Cheney from defending his administration’s use of torture. As recently as last month, Cheney said the interrogation of “war on terror” suspects was “done legally; it was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles.” But those assurances ring hollow.
Cheney helped set the administration on a lawless course only days after the 9/11 attacks. On Sept. 16, 2001, he told NBC’s Tim Russert that “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.
“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
The next day, Sept. 17. 2001, President Bush signed a “memorandum of understanding” that authorized the CIA to establish a “hidden global internment network” for the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, journalist Mark Danner reported in an article published in The New York Review of Books last month.
Last December, Cheney, said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times, that he “signed off on [waterboarding and the "enhanced interrogations] and others did, as well, too.”
Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al Nashiri. “That’s it, those three guys,” Cheney said.
The four Justice Department “torture” memos released last week says that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002 and Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, the month he was captured. One memo also indicates that a detainee was tortured over the objections of interrogators who said he did not have additional information to provide. But CIA headquarters overruled the objections.
Furthermore, a May 2005 memo says waterboarding was conducted “with far greater frequency” and with larger quantities of water than authorized.
In his book The One Percent Doctrine, author Ron Suskind reported that President George W. Bush had become obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.
“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was videotaped, but that record was destroyed in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.
According to a report in the Washington Post earlier this month, Zubaydah’s torture did not produce valuable intelligence and failed to foil alleged terrorist plots against the U.S.
Still, Cheney told the Washington Times the “enhanced interrogation” of the detainees “was absolutely the right thing to do.
“I thought the [administration's] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were sound,” Cheney said. “I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to do. And I think it produced the desired result.”
Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.
“Was it torture? I don’t believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately. They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.” Despite the torture criticism, Cheney said he has no regrets about the interrogation methods that he signed off on, claiming they were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for seven and a half years.” Cheney added, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do. If I was faced with those circumstances again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”
