Abraham Lincoln famously remarked: "Military necessity does not admit of cruelty nor of torture to procure confessions." If only someone would inform Dick Cheney of that wisdom. Cheney has repeatedly crawled out from under the rubble of the Bush administration to flaunt his unequivocal support for such barbarous actions exposed in an internal CIA report, of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) used against terrorism suspects.
The 2004 memos, produced by the CIA's inspector general, were released last month by the Department of Justice. In an immediate riposte the CIA itself published agency reports from 2004 and 2005 that could – potentially – justify the methods outlined in the inspector general's report. Straight away, Cheney gave the Weekly Standard a statement claiming: "The individuals subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al-Qaida."
The vice president feels vindicated that the CIA's interrogators were able to procure valuable intelligence – albeit through the use of torture – that contributed significantly in identifying parts of the al-Qaida network. Sadly, Cheney's tenuous justification was contradicted by a high-ranking Bush administration homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, who admitted that the CIA reports did not prove torture was as effective as he claimed.
Townsend told CNN: "It's very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it's not clear when techniques were applied versus when that information was received. It's implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn't say that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/01/dick-cheney-torture-ciahttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree
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