Reporters Fail to Fact-Check Cheney

Four months ago, Mike Allen and Josh Gerstein of Politico reported that former Vice President Dick Cheney was “pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.” It was one of many stories that hyped a “showdown” between the president and the former vice president. But yesterday, Spencer Ackerman obtained the documents Cheney was talking about and found that they didn’t back up Cheney’s version of the story.

[T]hroughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Allen follows up today by … quoting Cheney again.

Cheney maintains that records released this week show that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda” after the Sept. 11 attacks. A Democratic official disputed that assertion …

This is pretty amazing. Cheney claimed that confidential documents would back up his case. The documents were released, but didn’t back up his case. The result? “He-said, she-said” stories that don’t point out the crucial fact of Cheney’s deception.