Cheney Lied About CIA Torture Effectiveness

In Cheney’s mind, he’s a courageous patriot who’s not afraid to get things done. Cheney thinks that terrorists will be scared of the U.S. if only we’d torture more and the only way to get info is to throw accused terrorists (some of whom may be actually innocent) into Guantanamo (which has special terrorist repellant powers) and torture them for information. In his mind, interrogation techniques that have worked for centuries actually don’t work and reading Miranda rights to terrorists puts our country in danger. In Cheney’s world, the Constitution is inconvenient.

Cheney was very confident in his assertions that torture worked and he had a classified memo to prove it. The memo has been declassified and it doesn’t support Cheney’s assertions. In fact, it appears that timelines were altered to make Cheney’s case:

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

…

The CIA memo, called the Effectiveness Memo, was especially important because it was relied on by Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department’s acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to write memos in 2005 and 2007 giving the agency additional legal approvals to continue its program of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The memo reviewed the results of the use of EITs – which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity – mainly against two suspects” Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the report states. One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

The report also left out that much false information had been gathered through torture. But the main bit of evidence that Cheney offered to prove his case is absolutely wrong. Padilla was captured from information obtained by conventional interrogation techniques. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has captured more Taliban leaders in 1 month than Bush/Cheney captured in 6 years.