Sen. Levin: Cheney "Bore False Witness"

By: Stephanie Condon
Topics

(CBS)

A key senator said Wednesday night that the CIA documents former Vice President Dick Cheney would like declassified -- in order to vindicate the Bush administration's use of interrogation techniques like waterboarding -- do not, in fact, prove the techniques were successful.

"Those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at the Foreign Policy Association's annual dinner in Washington on Wednesday.

Furthermore, Levin said, his committee's 18-month investigation into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and the 200-page bipartisan report it produced "gives the lie to Mr. Cheney's claims."

Levin said Cheney has "bore false witness" in his claims that the acts that took place at Abu Ghraib were isolated events and that the techniques used at that prison had no link to the methods approved by the CIA.

"The seeds of Abu Ghraib's rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government," Levin said.

Cheney in a speech last week vigorously defended the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation methods, calling them"legal, essential, justified, and successful, and the right thing to do."

He also criticized the Obama administration for declassifying documents that showed the Bush administration's lawyers approved methods like waterboarding without declassifying other documents that allegedly prove the methods helped interrogators obtain useful information.

"For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers," Cheney said.

Levin on Wednesday countered, "I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction."

The CIA has said the documents must remain classified.

Former President Bush on Thursday also spoke out in defense of his administration's interrogation tactics, saying they were lawful and successfully helped interrogators obtain useful information.

"I can tell you that the information we got saved lives," he said.

Stephanie Condon
Stephanie Condon is a political reporter for CBSNews.com.
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by larrylinn1 June 1, 2009 11:20 PM EDT: Gee, Vice-Chickenhawk Adolph Cheney is a strong believer that water-boarding is acceptable, and the United States should ignore the Geneva Convention. We should not blame him. He did not serve in the military because "had other priorities than military service". As a typical infantryman that volunteered during the Viet Nam War, I remember the escape and evasion training at Ft. Ord. I was not captured, but +/- seven were ?captured?, and interrogated. All of ?POW?s? told the ?interrogators? what they were instructed not reveal. I assume that Dick Cheney is superior to the average infantryman. After all, he did not have to reveal that he had been drinking when he shot his friend in the face.
Cheney said the controversial policy of simulating drowning grew out of a CIA request for guidance on "what can you do that's appropriate and what you can do that's not appropriate." Vice-Coward Dick Cheney must realize that this statement I an act of mendacity. Why would the experienced and trained interrogators from the intelligence agencies ask Dick Cheney for advice? Perhaps he should study Skinner and Rogers and resolve aversive conditioning and positive reinforcement, and how these psychological approaches work in interrogation.; Reply to this comment


by billcholee June 1, 2009 1:37 PM EDT: i am beginning to understand the gop. they are republicans, not americans.; Reply to this comment


by stn_sage June 1, 2009 2:55 AM EDT: Mr. Levin should "take a dump---OR---get off the pot"!

He periodically claims the Bush administration is guilty of this or that---and as head of the Armed Services Committee---could easily take action against Bush administration officials---but, he never does! And, it's just as likely---he never will!

So, Mr. Levin, please give us---the public---"a break"---and stop your senseless, periodic complaining, and either take action or shut up already!

Because your "righteous posturing" is wearing just a tadbit thin!; Reply to this comment


by starleo146 May 31, 2009 5:05 PM EDT: Cheney is a true American HERO...........
Posted by Mr_2258-007 at 1:34 PM : May 31, 2009
+ report a

You are about as dumb as they come. Now I know why you are a republican a party of no, slander and division; Reply to this comment


by ericv857 May 31, 2009 10:55 AM EDT: The Bush Officials should be prosecuted if they approved torture, there is no grey area as the Former vice-president suggest. They should start with Alberto Gonzales who was totally unqualified to make those legal judgements just like Brownie and Katrina political flunkies who raised money for the campaign and bought a job.; Reply to this comment


by rednomo May 31, 2009 9:59 AM EDT: Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?

By FRANK RICH
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney?s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn?t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital?s fools now tread.

The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage ? this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right?s scare tactics, putting America?s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.

Cheney?s ?no middle ground? speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama?s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery ? graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. ?daisy? ad of 1964) in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama?s watch. ?No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,? Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama?s ?half measures? were leaving Americans ?half exposed.? The new president, he said, is unraveling ?the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.? In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama?s fault. A new ad shouting ?We told you so!? awaits only the updated video.

The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party ? Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney ? have variously cemented the G.O.P.?s brand as a whites-only men?s club by revoking Colin Powell?s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a ?reverse racist.? Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama?s. The only card left to play is 9/11.

Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to ?supermax? American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama?s Gitmo closure plans.

The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney?s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen ?dueling speeches? gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine?s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama?s faces atop prize fighters? bodies.

cont; Reply to this comment


by rednomo May 31, 2009 9:58 AM EDT: cont

Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men?s ideas. Cheney?s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama?s law-professor nuance. ?On policy grounds, you?ve got a real legitimate fight here,? David Gregory insisted on ?Meet the Press? as he regurgitated the former vice president?s argument (?You can?t compromise on these matters?) and questioned whether the president could ?really bring? his brand of pragmatism ?to the issue of the war on terror.?

One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney?s supposed TKO this way: ?The key to Cheney?s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.? But the facts, as usual, were wrong.

At the McClatchy newspapers? Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney?s boast that his administration had ?moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.? In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.

You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney?s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.

On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that ?the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.? It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein?s ?quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.? In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam?s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the ?lack of hard evidence? of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.

cont; Reply to this comment


by rednomo May 31, 2009 9:58 AM EDT: cont

Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, ?The One Percent Doctrine,? Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour ? but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.

When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda?s ?special event? strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of ?an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation? that is ?multiplied by time passing.? The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.

?What are the lessons of this period?? Suskind asked when we spoke last week. ?If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.? They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn?t and isn?t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney?s speech may be entertaining on ?24? or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. ?What we?re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,? Suskind said. ?We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.?

The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a ?nuclear? Saddam.

And where are we now? On the eve of Obama?s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if ?a real-life crisis? breaks out in Pakistan ?it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan?s weapons were ? or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.?

Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.

What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to ?build the thing we don?t have ? human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won?t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds ? which we?ve botched ? must be corrected and corrected quickly. That?s what wins the battle, not going medieval.? It?s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense ? among other military minds ? agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.

The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there?s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone?s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.; Reply to this comment


by HGOODGUY May 30, 2009 6:01 PM EDT: DO YOU THINK CHENEY LOOKS MORE LIKE BEVIS OR BUTTHEAD???
HUH--HUH HUH; Reply to this comment