Cheney's speech ignored some inconvenient truths

[BlueJessamine]

By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.


In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that 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 top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.


Article continues here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/68643.html

[Atticus]

1. It's worked for eight years;

Cheney and his partners in crime simply had to state something and it "became true". Those so rude and unpatriotic as to challenge these pronouncements were either ignored or, if necessary, destroyed.

I sometimes think there are only three categories of people left in our nation: those, like us, who actually think and evaluate what we see and hear and come to the rational conclusion that the Bushies were corrupt to the core and need to go to prison for the moral health of the country; those who, even if they do see the pervasive rot that's weakened us in the eyes of the world, simply don't care because they are either a.)making too much money to want to rock the boat or, b.) believe the corruption is a fair price to pay for keeping gay people from marrying each other; or, finally, those who both know and care who just won "Dancing With The Stars" and "American Idol".

In view of all we now know for certain about the Bush years, there is just one word that truly describes the attention given Cheney's whining and blustering: embarrassing.