Zachary Roth at TPM writes:
It's hardly news that Dick Cheney isn't likely to win any prizes for honesty any time soon. But yesterday offered yet another exhibit in the case.
During the debate over torture this spring, Cheney claimed that CIA memos, which he had asked to be declassified, would prove that torture proved effective in obtaining actionable intelligence.
Well, yesterday, those memos were released, along with the CIA inspector general's report. And, surprise surprise, they don't begin to show what Cheney said they did.
The memos, from 2004 and 2005, do say that some detainees, particularly Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, gave up useful information during debriefing sessions. But nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture.
Indeed, as Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent shows, most of the evidence suggests they came through traditional interrogation techniques. As Spencer puts it: "Cheney's public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don't."
It's no wonder that in his response to the memos' release, Cheney is reduced to playing silly semantic games that a reasonably intelligent junior high-schooler could see through. "The documents released Monday," said Cheney in a statement, "clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda." That's true, but it's totally different from Cheney's earlier claim -- that the documents would show it was the EITs themselves that elicited the information.
Now, the question is: will the media give this story the coverage it gave Cheney and his daughter Liz, when they went on every tv talk show to trumpet Cheney's original claims?
Probably not.
Ralph
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