Word: cheney
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...left the agency in 2004 wrote to me this week: "I knew the Agency crazies and their contractors would eventually pay legally or politically for torture. Many folks were talking about it. But management did nothing. The right wing nuts did not make us proud, and hid behind Cheney authorities to conduct crimes which added nothing and probably were counter-productive sadism, period." (See pictures of do-it-yourself waterboarding...
...program's defenders, most notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long claimed that "high-value detainees" like al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, initially resistant to interrogation, broke down under the coercive techniques and gave up crucial tips. The information they supplied, Cheney and other defenders have argued, helped to foil specific, imminent terrorist plots against the U.S. homeland, and thus saved thousands of American lives. (See TIME's pictures: "Do-It-Yourself Waterboarding...
...April, after the Obama Administration released the Bush Administration's so-called torture memos, which provided the legal rationale for the tactics, Cheney demanded that it also release two CIA memos that, he said, would "show the success of the effort." Those memos, taken together with the unclassified inspector general's report into the CIA's interrogation program, would be the smoking gun that proved, once and for all, that harsh interrogation paid...
...Critics of the Bush Administration have long claimed that the CIA was itself coerced into using harsh methods. Under this scenario, the agency was pressured by its political masters to go into the "dark side" - a phrase made famous by Cheney in the aftermath of 9/11. Bush backers counter that it was the intelligence professionals who said that hardened al-Qaeda operatives could only be broken in this manner. The IG report may help to establish the origins of the program. If it turns out the agency was forced into employing the harsh techniques, expect even louder calls for indictments...
...Defenders of the harsh interrogation - notably Cheney - claim it yielded a rich vein of information, possibly including details of imminent attacks on the U.S. homeland. But tantalizing references to the IG's findings contained in the now infamous "torture memos" by the Bush Administration Office of Legal Counsel suggest that interrogators didn't get much actionable information out of the detainees. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week that the truth lies somewhere in between: that the program achieved "modest success" - providing the agency with useful information about al-Qaeda organization and leadership, but not necessarily information about attacks...