Media Ignores Cheney's Admission He 'Signed Off' on Waterboarding
By Jason Leopold,
Author's note: Cheney’s admission during an interview with the Washington Times this week about his role in approving
the waterboarding of three Guantanamo detainees and the so-called "enhanced interrogation" of 33 prisoners was,
disturbingly, not covered at all by the mainstream media.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in another stunning admission during his campaign to burnish the Bush administration’s
legacy, said he personally authorized the “enhanced interrogations” of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the
waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said about the waterboarding, a practice of simulated drowning
done by strapping a person to a board, covering the face with a cloth and then pouring water over it, a torture
technique dating back at least to the Spanish Inquisition. The victim feels as if he is drowning.
Cheney identified the three waterboarded detainees as al-Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and al
Nashiri. “That's it, those three guys,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times.
Other detainees at secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to harsh treatment, including being stripped
naked, forced into painful stress positions, placed in extremes of heat or cold and prevented from sleeping – actions
that international human rights organizations, and previously the U.S. government, have denounced as torture and illegal
abuse.
“I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do,” Cheney said of what he called the “enhanced interrogation” of
the detainees. “I thought the [administration’s] legal opinions that were rendered [endorsing the harsh treatment] were
sound. I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they [the CIA interrogators] were asking to be able to
do. And I think it produced the desired result.”
Cheney also took issue with the notion that waterboarding was torture.
“Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture,” Cheney said. “The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.
They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration, about what they felt they
needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.”
Other experts, including some military and intelligence interrogators, have disputed Cheney’s claims of success in
extracting reliable information through waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Much of the confessed information
turned out to be dubious or incorrect.
The First Case
Zubaydah was the first “war on terror” detainee to be subjected to the Bush administration’s waterboarding, according to
Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s
interrogation methods.
However, according to author Ron Suskind who interviewed CIA and other insiders, Abu Zubaydah was not the "high-value
detainee" that the Bush administration had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization,
handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine.
Nevertheless, Suskind said President George W. Bush became obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have
about pending terrorist plots against the United States.
"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some
of these harsh methods really work?"
Abu Zubaydah's captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations
or impending plots. That realization was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice
President," Suskind wrote.
But Bush did not want to "lose face" because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, according to Suskind.
Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number
of U.S. targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind wrote, Zubaydah’s
information under duress was judged not credible.
Still, that did not stop "thousands of uniformed men and women [who] raced in a panic to each ... target," Suskind
wrote. "The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
Cheney Unapologetic
Last week, in an interview with ABC News, Cheney was unapologetic about the waterboarding and other harsh techniques
used against the detainees. But Cheney’s matter-of-fact response to the Washington Times’ questions on Monday provided
the most detailed look yet at the administration’s highly classified interrogation program.
In the interview, Cheney defended the interrogation program by claiming the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel
(OLC) drafted legal memorandums stating Bush had the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention and order harsh
interrogations of prisoners in the “war on terror.”
But the memos were written after Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-White House Counsel
Alberto Gonzales and other high-ranking Cabinet officials known as the Principals Committee met in July 2002 to discuss
specific interrogation techniques — including the outlawed technique of waterboarding — to be used against “war on
terror” detainees.
The OLC attorneys fashioned the legal arguments that then gave legal cover for the interrogation strategies that the
White House wanted to carry out.
The Aug. 1, 2002, opinion, widely referred to as the “Torture Memo,” was written by Jay Bybee, an assistant attorney
general at the OLC, and John Yoo, Bybee’s deputy. It was addressed to Gonzales and stated that unless the amount of pain
administered to a detainee during an interrogation results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious
impairment of body functions" than the technique could not be defined as torture.
Additionally, the memo said CIA interrogators would not be prosecuted for violating anti-torture laws as long as they
acted in “good faith” while using brutal techniques to obtain information from suspected terrorists.
“To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” the memo
said. “Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of
torture.”
The memo was drafted the same month Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding.
Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee as head of the OLC in October 2003, quickly determined that the Aug. 1, 2002, memo
was “sloppily written” and “legally flawed” and withdrew it.
Administration critics also have noted that actions are not made legal simply by having friendly lawyers give favorable
opinions.
“You can’t just suddenly change something that is illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an
opinion that saying it’s legal,” said Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee whose panel spent
two years investigating the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, said Cheney used the Justice
Department to “twist” the law “and in some cases ignored it altogether, in order to permit interrogators to use barbaric
methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes.”
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “there must be consequences for [these] illegal
activities.” He added, “A special prosecutor should be appointed. To do otherwise is to send a message of impunity that
will only embolden future administrations to again engage in serious violations of the law.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is close to wrapping up a formal investigation to
determine whether agency attorneys, including Yoo and Bybee, provided the White House with poor legal advice when they
drafted the legal opinions.
The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, Al Nashiri and Kalid Sheikh Mohammed was videotaped, but those records were destroyed
in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA's use of so-called "black site"
prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.
John Durham, an assistant attorney general in Connecticut, was appointed special counsel earlier this year to
investigate the destruction of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations.
Despite the torture criticism, Cheney said he has no regrets about the interrogation methods that he signed off on,
claiming they were “directly responsible for the fact that we've been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against
the homeland for seven and a half years.”
Cheney added, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do. If I was faced with those
circumstances again, I'd do exactly the same thing.”
Cheney’s remarks to the Washington Times were part of a two-week media blitz that has sought to highlight the Bush
administration’s “accomplishments.”
The White House has published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record” in an attempt to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency.
However, Cheney’s blasé responses to questions about torture have instead fed growing demands for a criminal
investigation against Cheney and other Bush administration officials.
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Jason Leopold launched a new online investigative news magazine, The Public Record.