dick cheney

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the former U.S. Attorney who’s been pointing out for more than a year that waterboarding is and always has been torture, made the key point yesterday (and the same one I made here) that the criminal investigation of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that turned into torture would be an ordinary and obvious [...]

It’s been an amazing thing: faced with hundreds of pages of documents disclosed last week that explicitly state and thoroughly demonstrate that it’s unknown whether “enhanced interrogation” worked, all it takes for the press to ignore the record is for former Vice President Dick Cheney to bluster aggressively. After all, you know, reading documents is [...]

I can’t resist. One more from Cheney’s Fox News interview:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that — like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president’s cabinet — he thinks President Obama was right when he said “we ought to go forward, not back.”
But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I [...]

One more thing from the former  vice president’s Fox interview yesterday. Discussing John Durham’s torture probe:
WALLACE: If the prosecutor asks to speak to you, will you speak to him?
CHENEY: It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really [...]

The former vice president has an interesting standard for what constitutes certainty. Somehow in his hands a CIA inspector general’s report that says repeatedly that it can’t determine if torture techniques like waterboarding added any value to interrogations of top al-Qaeda detainees becomes an occasion for a torture enthusiast’s victory lap. (Credit to Chris Wallace [...]

Bob Fertik of Democrats.com has put that question to Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who made that Cheneyesque argument to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday.
Talking about Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that he plans to investigate interrogations where abuse went far beyond what was allowed, Haas told Scarborough:
I [...]

When he goes on Fox News! Yes, the former vice president is going to sit down with Chris Wallace on Sunday to discuss the CIA’s torture disclosures and the discrepancy between what they say and what he said they’d say. Right, Chris? Yeah?

In the ongoing debate over who ought (or ought not) be prosecuted for the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody, American Civil Liberties Union national security lawyer Alex Abdo, made an important point yesterday that’s been largely overlooked.
“At the end of investigating is the time when you decide who to prosecute. You don’t [...]

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have [...]