Cheney Acknowledges Role in Torture

by: Richard Allen Smith

Tue Dec 16, 2008 at 22:08:10 PM EST

But while "schadenfreude" and "Cheney" have long been synonyms, The Vice President's remarks yesterday were the first that explicitly advocated the torture of captives in American custody:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.

Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.

Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do."

His comments come on the heels of disclosures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation methods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned internationally as torture.

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

So there is Cheney's admission that he approved torture, specifically one practice that is a war crime.  But Cheney is also admitting to indirectly assisting in the recruitment of insurgents who fought Americans in Iraq and supporting a technique that produced poor intelligence. That isn't to say that I think the Vice President conspired to aide in the death of American soldiers. But as VetVoice diarist and author Matthew Alexander notes, Cheney's chosen methods did just that:

Torture and abuse cost American lives. I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Alexander further notes that conventional interrogation methods, as opposed to the Cheney sanctioned practice of torture, produced quality intel:

The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them...I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000.

The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi....Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

Not only is the rapport based technique effective, using torture is counter productive.  In repeated studies, intelligence acquired through coercion has proven unreliable. A study conducted by Roger Koppl of Fairleigh Dickinson University made the following key findings:

Torture is not an effective means to gather information.

Torturers do not know the truth when they hear it.  

Torture victims understand this fact and therefore hide the truth.  

Torturers cannot make a believable promise to stop torture when they hear the truth.  

Torture victims understand this fact and therefore hide the truth.  

The study is further corroborated by recent experience in Iraq.  After the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal, techniques such as hooding, stripping and sleep deprivation were banned there. In the six months that followed, American interrogators received as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence. Major General Geoffery Miller, the American commander in charge of interrogations and detentions at the time submitted the following assessment:

In my opinion, a rapport-based interrogation that recognizes respect and dignity, and having very well-trained interrogators, is the basis by which you develop intelligence rapidly and increase the validity of that intelligence.

With of this information considered, much of it from individuals who have more time in combat than Cheney has outside of undisclosed locations, it is appalling, though not surprising, to see our Vice President proudly proclaiming his role in the torture of other human beings.  This man is despicable, and I look forward to January 20 when we can say, as another man who once served as Vice President said, "our long national nightmare is over".