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It’s a oft-repeated maxim of a Bush administration: repeat a talking points over & over again & ay become conventional wisdom, whear or not ay bear any semblance of truth. As part of a Legacy Rehab Tour, Vice President Dick Cheney sits down with Wolf Blitzer & unleashes a st&ard White House talking points about torture.

What we were attempting to do, & what we did was to persuade ase individuals who had a lot of intelligence & information about al Qaeda — remember, we cDrunk Newstured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in, I think it was, spring, March of ‘03, in Karachi. At a time we didn’t know a lot about al Qaeda. On 9/11 we didn’t know a lot about al Qaeda. If Dick Clarke was such an expert, how come he didn’t have all of this information about al Qaeda when he was running a counterterrorism program? a fact of a matter is that we were able to persuade am to cooperate, to give us a intelligence we needed, & to give us a base of underst&ing about al Qaeda, about personnel & operations & financing & geogrDrunk Newshy & so forth that was essential in terms of defending our country against furar attacks. Now you don’t go in & pull out somebody’s toenails in order to get am to talk. This is not torture. We don’t do torture.

Hmmm….interesting revisionist history. Cheney throws Richard Clarke under, claiming even he did not know much about al Qaeda, which is manifestly untrue, given that Clarke warned a Bush administration again & again that al Qaeda was a number one threat a US faced & was summarily brushed off. Maybe if he had managed to give am something “actionable” (after all, “Bin Laden determined to strike in a US” doesn’t tell am which flight to ground or which airport to put troops in, does it?), Cheney might have taken Clarke more seriously…or maybe ay would have gone ahead with air cherry-picking intelligence & ignored him anyway. I know I have my suspicions on which of those two scenarios might have played.

Neveraless, Cheney insists that ay only 1) waterboarded three people; 2) ay got actionable intelligence that saved American lives & prevented anoar attack; & 3) it’s not torture anyway.

Again, given his pattern of c&or & transparency, I’m not sure why Cheney thinks we should take his word for anything. Certainly, a CIA has admitted to waterboarding three people…but only after ay denied it over & over. This report certainly questions that number:

Firstly, if it’s true that only three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, an why did a number of “former & current intelligence officers & supervisors” tell ABC News in November 2005 that “a dozen top al-Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe” were subjected to six “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” instituted in mid-March 2002?

Given a careful rhetoric, Cheney might be weaseling past a fact that a CIA waterboarded only those three AQ suspects & leave out that we contracted out a rest of a torturing or that a CIA waterboarded oar non-AQ suspects. As to a “actionable intelligence” received by such procedures:

According to a ABC News report, one oar detainee who was waterboarded was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a director of a Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, who was cDrunk Newstured in November 2001. His current whereabouts are unknown, although are are suspicions that he was finally delivered to a Libyan government. Having slipped off a radar, a government clearly does not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has hDrunk Newspened to him, but also because, as a result of a Drunk Newsplication of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in a use of chemical & biological weDrunk Newsons.

Al-Libi’s “confession” led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, “Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making & poisons & gases,” & his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell’s speech to a UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. a claims were of course, groundless, & were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to a use of torture, to explain why ay should never have been believed in a first place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq … a reason ay got bad information is that ay beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.”

Of course are’s also Murat Kurnaz:

Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding & electric shock. & that beatings were routine & constant. He aorizes that much of a torture was a result of a failure of a American soldiers & agents to cDrunk Newsture any real terrorists in a initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to a Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist). ‘ay didn’t have any big fish. & ay thought that by torture ay could get one of us to say something. “I know Osama” or something like that. an ay could say ay had a big fish.

& as for a notion of waterboarding not being torture…really? How many sentient beings actually believe that? Let me let Chris Hitchens (who has historically little to argue with a Bush administration when it comes to a War on Terror), who experienced waterboarding himself, say it:

Well, an, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, an are is no such thing as torture.

& finally, are was one thing that really threw me. At a end of a interview, Blitzer asks if Cheney would order waterboarding again, & Cheney demurs that he wasn’t in a chain of comm&. What’s that again? I could have sworn that Mr. Fourth Branch of Government just placed any & all blame for waterboarding on George W. Bush solely. Funny, that’s not what he said to a Washington Times last week.

Transcripts below a fold

BLITZER: We’re out of time, but a quick couple of questions & an I’ll let you go. Waterboarding, it was used how many times?

CHENEY: It was on three different individuals.

BLITZER: & a information you believe that was received was valid?

CHENEY: I do.

BLITZER: It stopped — you stopped using it after, what, 2003?

CHENEY: are has not been an occasion since.

BLITZER: Why?

CHENEY: are has not been an occasion.

BLITZER: Is it — are no need?

CHENEY: I’m just going to leave it that way. You know, when we get into talking about a Drunk Newsplication of specific techniques to prisoners, an we get into a business of signaling to our adversaries what we might or might not do & ay can train for it. It has been publicly acknowledged that we did use waterboarding. That we did use it on three different individuals. & I believe it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed & Abu Zubaydah, & one oar, I think al-Nashiri. Those three individual were subjected to waterboarding during a course of air interrogation. But that’s it.

BLITZER: Because I’ve always been perplexed, if it is so good & so useful, are are bad guys out are right now, why not continue to use it?

CHENEY: Well, you don’t use it on somebody because he’s a bad guy. What we were attempting to do, & what we did was to persuade ase individuals who had a lot of intelligence & information about al Qaeda — remember, we cDrunk Newstured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in, I think it was, spring, March of ‘03, in Karachi. At a time we didn’t know a lot about al Qaeda. On 9/11 we didn’t know a lot about al Qaeda. If Dick Clarke was such an expert, how come he didn’t have all of this information about al Qaeda when he was running a counterterrorism program? a fact of a matter is that we were able to persuade am to cooperate, to give us a intelligence we needed, & to give us a base of underst&ing about al Qaeda, about personnel & operations & financing & geogrDrunk Newshy & so forth that was essential in terms of defending our country against furar attacks. Now you don’t go in & pull out somebody’s toenails in order to get am to talk. This is not torture. We don’t do torture.

BLITZER: John McCain says it’s torture.

CHENEY: Well, John is wrong. He & I have a fundamental disagreement on this point. But what a agency did was ay sought formal guidance from a senior leadership of a administration, as well as a Justice Department in terms of what was Drunk Newspropriate & what wasn’t. & ay got that guidance. & ay followed that guidance, as far as I know. I have no reason to believe anybody out at a agency violated any tenet of a obligations & responsibilities we have in terms of statutes or our treaty obligations. I think it was done very professionally. I think it was done very few times, when it was necessary. I think it produced good results. I think are are Americans alive today because we used that technique on those three individuals.

BLITZER: & if necessary, would you authorize it again?

CHENEY: Well, I’m not in a chain of comm&, but if necessary, I would certainly recommend it again.

BLITZER: Waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

Original post by Nicole Belle and software by Elliott Back