Dick Cheney Lied About Torture
[su_right_ad]The Senate torture report puts the lie to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s continued pronouncements, as former Naval Criminal Investigative Service interrogator Mark Fallon reports.
It’s official: torture doesn’t work. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not in fact “produce the intelligence that allowed us to get Osama bin Laden,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in 2011. Those are among the central findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11…
I had long since come to that conclusion myself. As special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force with investigators and intelligence personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I was privy to the information provided by Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I was aware of no valuable information that came from waterboarding. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program—has concluded that abusive techniques didn’t help the hunt for Bin Laden. Cheney’s claim that the frequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “produced phenomenal results for us” is simply false.
The self-defeating stupidity of torture might come as news to Americans who’ve heard again and again from Cheney and other political leaders that torture “worked.” Professional interrogators, however, couldn’t be less surprised. We know that legal, rapport-building interrogation techniques are the best way to obtain intelligence, and that torture tends to solicit unreliable information that sets back investigations.
Yes, torture makes people talk—but what they say is often untrue. Seeking to stop the pain, people subjected to torture tend to say what they believe their interrogators want to hear.[su_csky_ad]
tiredoftea December 10th, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Darth Cheney lied. In other news, the sun rose in the east, this morning.
Scopedog December 10th, 2014 at 3:06 pm
Yep. And water is wet.
cecilia December 10th, 2014 at 8:09 pm
a friend also calls him Dick “Wormtongue” Cheney
🙂
tiredoftea December 10th, 2014 at 8:11 pm
I wish I could be so polite!
cecilia December 11th, 2014 at 9:35 am
LOL, yeah, I’ve got a few names I won’t use in polite company.
granpa.usthai December 11th, 2014 at 1:55 am
you’re welcome to use MY prophecy that fully qualifies me to be a ‘PROPHET OF GOD’ by Biblical qualifications.
edmeyer_able December 10th, 2014 at 2:16 pm
georgie was “uncomfortable” when he learned of some of the techniques that were used, turns out it was only a small pebble in his shoe.
Scopedog December 10th, 2014 at 3:05 pm
Or a pretzel.
fancypants December 10th, 2014 at 2:18 pm
oh I know who lied…..
http://youtu.be/W3Gm-JFmjQQ
edmeyer_able December 10th, 2014 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for posting this but watching Ventura would cause me as much discomfort as watching bill o-lie-lly.
fancypants December 10th, 2014 at 2:48 pm
watching bill is like watching paint dry. you can always expect who he’s going to side with no matter how strong the evidence is.
jesse on the other hand may not touch on as many topics but he does Debunk ” the factor ” and their gop cheerleading quite often
granpa.usthai December 11th, 2014 at 1:53 am
he was definitely going to hold GW’s feet to the fire until he realized GW said he was ‘misled’. Which is really no reason to stop an occupation some were saying how about a hundred years for!
fancypants December 10th, 2014 at 3:23 pm
speaking of bill orielly
I bet this is the snl ferguson skit he plans to show tonight
http://youtu.be/mVzCih9RnWg
Bunya December 10th, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Really? No! This is the same hero who received 5 Viet Nam deferments so he could grow up and become somebody who’s brave enough to send others off to fight. Ted Nugent would be so proud.
Scopedog December 10th, 2014 at 3:05 pm
The truly terrible thing is that he’s still going on, oblivious to all the horrible things he unleashed–or he’s just looking at things through one hell of a twisted lens.
If there is any justice, he will go down in history as the worst VP to ever hold the office.
Bunya December 10th, 2014 at 3:26 pm
I have this vision of Cheney, tethered to a wall in a public square, being pelted with dog turds.
Hirightnow December 10th, 2014 at 6:28 pm
Remove the words “in history as the worst VP to ever hold the office”, and I’ll agree even more.
tiredoftea December 10th, 2014 at 8:13 pm
Try worst human being in history!
Larry Schmitt December 10th, 2014 at 2:24 pm
And in other breaking news, hell is hot and water is wet. Film at eleven. Back to you, John.
granpa.usthai December 11th, 2014 at 1:49 am
at least you don’t have to worry about eternal constipation in hell.
Anomaly 100 December 10th, 2014 at 2:35 pm
Shocker!
edmeyer_able December 10th, 2014 at 2:50 pm
Lies were the basis for the whole administration.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Yes, that is one way they kept information from the American public and Congress before the invasion.
It is also how Cheney kept what he was doing from administration officials who should have been informed and attended meetings when the whole torture approval was being formed. Not only did the classification keep those out Cheney and Addington chose to be kept in the dark, but it silenced those who were aware of what they were doing.
Above, cecilia referred to a book by FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated and got a lot of intelligence from people like Abu Zubaida.
Here is a fine article by Soufan published in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html
rg9rts December 11th, 2014 at 4:46 am
Wouldn’t you say what you think they want to hear??? I would…
mea_mark December 10th, 2014 at 2:52 pm
“… people subjected to torture tend to say what they believe their interrogators want to hear.” — Republicans love to hear what they want to hear without any regard for the truth. No wonder they like torture, explains so much about republican administrations and their policies.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 4:50 pm
I highly recommend Barton Gelman’s book “Angler,” which describes Cheney’s machinations as veep.
Budda December 10th, 2014 at 7:35 pm
“Big Dick” Cheney has lied about many things.
cecilia December 10th, 2014 at 8:12 pm
if anyone wants to know about how to interrogate try reading The Black Banners:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Black-Banners/
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 10:22 pm
Outstanding pull, cecilia!
I’ve been a fan of Ali Soufan for years now. The Black Banners is at the top of my ‘want list.’
Here are some links:
Historycommons profile:
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111100coleresultsforfbi#a111100coleresultsforfbi
New Yorker article:
http://www.lawrencewright.com/WrightSoufan.pdf
Washington Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301281.html?hpid=topnews
New York Times op-ed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html
Newsweek article:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089
It is important to not just know that Cheney lied, but to know the facts as well.
One of my ongoing research projects is combing through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission Report footnotes and putting the information from various interrogations on a time line. On the same timeline are dates when the torture memos were issued. I have gotten a lot noted, but still have a long way to go. It’s a slow slog.
One of the lies commonly told is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaidah were not talking and that’s why we needed to waterboard them. When we look at what these prisoners were telling before the waterboarding took place, we see they were giving up a great deal.
cecilia December 11th, 2014 at 9:37 am
thanks for the links…I suspect you will find some of your answers in Soufan’s book.
searambler December 10th, 2014 at 8:19 pm
“I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. But I did not refuse, or repeat my insistence that I was required under the Geneva Conventions to provide my captors only with my name, rank and serial number. Instead, I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse,” he wrote. (John McCain, on his time at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’.)
granpa.usthai December 11th, 2014 at 1:46 am
explains why the 3rd Reich took over the world.
jstsmlbrlcnsrvtvguy December 10th, 2014 at 11:11 pm
Dick (no offense intended to any other Dicks or dicks) sucks. Some say that in May 2001 the VP’s Office took control (for some reason) of all war “game”/exercises… The fact that numerous such exercises were scheduled some four months later… resulting in jets being sent all over the place and the insertion of numerous (22?) false radar blips… might make some folks (just wacko-bird conspiracy theory types, of course) wonder…
rg9rts December 11th, 2014 at 4:45 am
They all lied…the UN wants to charge ALL of those responsible…they get a free ride to Amsterdam and a front row seat in The Hague
theoldsheepherder December 11th, 2014 at 5:48 pm
Enemas are used to induce bowel movements not as a means of feeding people against their will. The colon will immediately excrete food liquefied that is forced into the anus. It is human biology. Anybody claiming this was a medical procedure to force feed prisoners is either lying, stupid, or both. America is full of dry turds in need of dislodging but due process and not enemas is what we shout use to get rid of them.