Cheney’s speech contained omissions and misstatements

By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were “legal” and produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Some other omissions and misstatements by Cheney in his Thursday speech:

• Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was “flatly contrary” to U.S. national security, and would help Al Qaeda train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, “strongly supported” Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that “we do not need these techniques to keep America safe.”

• Cheney said the Bush administration “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.”

The former vice president didn’t point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9/11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

• Cheney denied there was any connection between the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on “a few sadistic guards ... in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency.”

However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ’a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.”

• Cheney said that “only detainees of the highest intelligence value” were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda operative to be captured after 9/11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in 9/11.

The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods “was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda,” Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.

• Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

Cheney made no mention of Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with Al Qaeda, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.

A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.

• Cheney accused Obama of “the selective release” of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.

“I’ve formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained,” Cheney said. “Last week, that request was formally rejected.”

However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.

• Cheney said that only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy Newspapers investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to U.S. officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005, that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in January 2004.

Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania.

In January 2007, the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.

• Cheney slammed Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.

The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush’s second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

“One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back,” Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007, interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. “So we need help in closing Guantanamo.”

• Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9/11, the Bush team had to take into account “dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.”

Cheney didn’t explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with Al Qaeda, a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.

The late Iraqi dictator’s association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.

The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9/11 said Hussein’s regime “has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President (George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait.”

A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that although Hussein supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad, at least until Hussein had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no “direct operational link” with Al Qaeda.