By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
May 24, 2009 | BostonHerald.com
Cheney said waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." He also quoted Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair as saying the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization."
In his statement April 21, however, Blair said "these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." A 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that the information helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four secret Bush-era memos released last month. And FBI Director Robert Muller said in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
Cheney said his administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks." In fact, the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan, leaving Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, at large nearly eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since 2001, and extremists have launched a concerted attack on nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
In fact, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting release of materials that are subject of lawsuits.
Cheney said only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.
A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.
[But now many of these innocent detainees may indeed be ready for jihad, after being imprisoned with real terrorists for years, and mistreated by guards, and denied lawyers or habeus corpus. Might not you be pissed off and ready for revenge if another country imprisoned you for no good reason, taking away several years of your life? This is the no-win dilemma that Obama inherited from Dubya. And Guantanamo is not the only prison. Dubya set up a network of prisons with no clear plan what to do with these detainees, or how to screen and release the innocent ones. - J]
Cheney denied there was any link between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards." But a bipartisan Senate Armed Services report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to approval of the techniques by senior Bush officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
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