Cheney: Interrogations saved ‘hundreds of thousands’ of lives
Published: May 10, 2009
Updated 6 months ago
Former vice president Dick Cheney insisted Sunday that intelligence extracted from tough interrogations of suspected Al-Qaeda militants had saved “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of US lives.
Defending anew the former administration’s controversial policies, Cheney accused President Barack Obama’s team of sitting on memoranda that he said would justify his claim about the value of the intelligence produced.
“No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do,” he said on CBS television, adamant that techniques decried by critics as torture were essential to break the resistance of captured extremists.
“I’m convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,” Cheney said, arguing again that Al-Qaeda was bent on attacking a US city with a nuclear device.
In one of his first acts as president, Obama reversed predecessor George W. Bush’s approval of harsh interrogation methods such as “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning.
Recently released memoranda detail the legal reasoning by Bush administration officials justifying waterboarding and other techniques such as sleep deprivation, physical slaps and painful “stress positions.”
Cheney reaffirmed that Obama had made the United States more vulnerable to attack, and hit out at talk by Democratic lawmakers that Bush legal officials should face prosecution.
The former vice president challenged Obama’s administration to declassify two memos that he said showed the Central Intelligence Agency had profited from the interrogations to thwart acts of terrorism.
“The memos do exist. I have seen them. I had them in my files at one time. Now everything is part of the National Archives. I’m sure the agency (CIA) has copies of those materials.
“If we’re going to have this debate, it ought to be a complete debate. Those memos ought to be out there for people to look at and journalists like yourself to evaluate in terms of what we were able to accomplish,” he said.
“It talks specifically about different attack planning that was underway and how it was stopped. It talks about how the volume of intelligence reports that were produced from that.”
While Bush has kept a low profile since leaving office, Cheney has repeatedly gone on the airwaves to defend his own legacy as probably the most powerful US vice president ever.
“If I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves? Then the critics have free run and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth,” he said, adding he was prepared to testify in Congress if necessary.
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Does anyone else miss the days when Cheney kept his mouth shut? Now it is impossible to shut him up. Mr. I Won’t Tell You Who I Talked Too or Who Visited Me is now all about open government?
For 8 years he had the capability to show the American people evidence and he didn’t.
I can only say we should encourage him to go full out with his denouncement of honorable, moderate Republicans (Powell) so he can assist Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck and all the others into extinction!
Hehehehe, wanna guess that Chuck Norris is their next candidate?
So Dick, did torture save us before or after we were in the last throes.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around his motive.
Don’t get me wrong, I think what happened was torture etc.. so, why is he advocating so brazenly for it in public? Surely his head would be first on the chopping block and all the talk is just feeding more ammunition to prosecutors.
Is he doing it because he knows others on Capitol Hill are also conspirators by association or ignorance, and because of this no one will have the guts to bring charges against him?
Wow
Cheney obviously either does not have a lawyer or is not listening to him/them. He is repeatedly confessing to personal involvment in a Federal Crime of the most heinous sort. The Prince of fear is scared out of his wits. Notice he even specifically implicated Bush as well this time. He’s singing like a canary and the trials haven’t even started yet. As unpleasent as it is to hear him weekly, legally he is destroying himself, and if you filter out the typical Cheney arrogance, his pratter closely resembles that of a very weak and un-saavy Mafioso cracking under the investigator’s lamps in an old movie. When your enemy is slitting his own throat, why stop him? He will greatly regret these interviews later.
Far from saving lives, the phony “war on terror” has resulted in estimated excess deaths of 655,000 to 1 million in Iraq alone. But it has made some war criminals rich.
From my latest compilation of evidence, with over 500 hyperlinks:
IT WASN’T MUSLIMS
With a peer-reviewed scientific journal having published “loaded gun” (i.e. unreacted nano-thermite) evidence finally proving beyond doubt that World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7 were brought down in a series of controlled demolitions, here are a few more facts to consider.
It wasn’t Muslims in an Afghan cave who had access to highly energetic nano-thermites; it was the US military and government scientists such as those connected with NIST.
It wasn’t Muslims who ran a construction company that was awarded a $124 million contract for construction of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) headquarters in Washington, DC, which oversees the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC-IH), which was described during the 1990s as the “National Center for Energetics”, the military’s term for “explosives work”, and as of 1999-2000 the “only reliable source of aluminum nanopowders in the United States”; it was Tom Leppert who was CEO of Turner Construction as of 9/11/01, and who even writes parts of Presidential speeches.
It wasn’t Muslims who ran a construction company that had supervised the 2000 demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, participated in the post 9/11 collection and disposal of the steel wreckage of the WTC towers, and carried out extensive renovations throughout the World Trade Center complex right up to the morning of 9/11 including fireproofing “upgrades” on the floors that were struck by planes and subsequently “failed”, when the steel had already been certified to ASTM E119 by Universal Laboratories, and, in tests sponsored by NIST on corresponding floor assemblies subjected to greater heat exposure and protected with less fireproofing than was the case at the WTC, the test specimens “were able to sustain the maximum design load” without collapsing for as long as the tests were run (2 to 3 1/2 hours); it was Tom Leppert who was CEO of Turner Construction as of 9/11/01 and received a Torch of Conscience award from the American Jewish Congress.
It wasn’t Muslims who trained their cameras on the World Trade Center Towers prior to the first aircraft impact, who danced and celebrated with high fives prior to the second impact as most onlookers still believed it had been a terrible accident rather than terrorism, and who were caught with foreign passports, $4,700 in cash hidden in a sock, maps highlighting certain places in the city, and a van that tested positive for traces of explosives; it was Israelis Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari, several of whom have been confirmed as Mossad agents, as part of their job in “documenting the event”.
It wasn’t Muslims who were caught on 9/11/01 operating in teams with vans full of explosives, including one team who attempted to blow up the George Washington Bridge with a truck packed with tons of explosives, and another who blew up a van between 6th and 7th on King Street with a mural painted of a remote controlled airplane diving into New York and blowing up; it was Israelis, which is why the authorities did their best to ignore and bury these reports which included a suspected van bomb driven into the WTC basement and exploded to weaken the structure.
It wasn’t Muslims who were caught shortly after midnight on May 7, 2002 very close to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Oak Harbor, Wash., (where the Navy conducts explosive ordnance training for bomb disposal mobile units to the consternation of local marine life) with a rental truck that tested positive for TNT and RDX plastic explosives; it was Israelis whose cover story was of “delivering furniture” but regarded by authorities as dubious because of the early morning hour, and the authorities’ subsequent claim that the dog’s reaction and initial tests for explosives were wrong is so full of holes that it merely demonstrates the power of the Israeli lobby.
It wasn’t Muslims who were in New York on 9/11 and in London on the morning of the 7/7 attacks; it was Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudy Giuliani.
It wasn’t Muslims who received advance warning of the London 7/7 attacks; it was Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad.
It wasn’t Muslims who provided two hours’ advance warning of an attack on the World Trade Center via an instant messaging company based in Herzliya; it was Israelis.
It wasn’t a Muslim who fled the US on September 14, 2001; it was Dominick Suter of “Urban Moving Systems” who fled to Israel.
It wasn’t over a hundred Muslims who, from around January 2000 to September 2001, posed as “art students” and attempted to penetrate US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) offices and other federal buildings including 36 sensitive Department of Defense (DoD) sites, were caught with diagrams of the interior of federal buildings and photographs of federal agents and often evaded security by entering through back doors or parking garages, and even visited the homes of senior federal officials but not those of their neighbors; it was Israelis, none of whom were “art students” but many of whom had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. Not surprisingly, the Press went for a limited hangout by trying to pretend the Israelis were merely shadowing “Arab hijackers” and either failed to pass on information, or “it was not treated seriously”, the old canard about “intelligence failure”. The operations of the Israeli fake “art students” is well documented, including plenty of names and even descriptions. An unusually large number of these Israelis were located in Irving, Dallas, TX (p.23, previous link), which is about ten miles west of Tom Leppert’s Alva Court home, which is barely more than a mile north of the Dallas home that George W. Bush moved into after leaving office.
It isn’t Muslim countries that have a massive spy ring in the USA capable of tapping into much of the telecoms network and using information obtained to blackmail Americans; it is Israel.
It wasn’t Muslims who received advance warning on Monday September 10, 2001, against flying the next day; it was San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and a group of top Pentagon officials.
It wasn’t Muslims who acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Buildings Four and Five and approximately 400,000 square feet of retail space, and insured for billions of dollars against terror attacks a mere six weeks before terror attacks did in fact occur, and then employed (to press for the insurance claim) a ’structural engineer’ who misleadingly asserts that steel loses half its strength at “400 degrees”; it was - in a deal negotiated by Lewis Eisenberg of the Port Authority - Benjamin Netanyahu’s (and Ariel Sharon’s and Ehud Barak’s) friend Larry Silverstein and his partner Australian billionaire and “Holocaust survivor” Frank Lowy who fought “in the Jewish underground”, was embroiled in a high-level bank corruption scandal with Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert and found to be making payments to Lord (Michael Abraham) Levy who was arrested several times in relation to a “cash for honors” scandal, Levy being a “tennis partner” and advisor of Tony Blair.
For remainder, see:
http://www.takeourworldback.com/itwasntmuslims.htm
Saved hundreds of thousands of lives?
Got any proof, Dick?
About as much proof as there was of the infamous “weapons of mass destruction”.
So the Ends justifies the Means.
Now that I’m almost 50, I realize that the USA we were sold doesn’t exist.
Maybe it never did.
I saved your life the other day, DICK, I killed a shit eating dog……
Why is this murdering cyborg still walking around free and alive? And why has open season - no bag limit, no catch and release - not been declared on the CIA/Mossad swine that infest this world? Fuck Obama, fuck this administration and congress along with it. It was nice there for a few weeks to dream that the nightmare of the murderous, criminal Bush administration was over. But now, when we see the likes of Rove and Cheney and the gap-toothed Rice still lying and spouting off in the media, we cannot escape the fact that is business as usual, and the only thing that will stop them now is revolution.
Robert S. Finnegan
Managing Editor
Southeast Asia Independent News
seanews1@yahoo.com
Jakarta, Indonesia
62-21-892-5656
Cheney can say that he poured hot fudge on babies and ate them. No one will do anything. Cheney is above the law. That’s what he’s demonstrating. He’s playing his own game of chicken with Holder, and Cheney will win every time.
Cheney enjoys showing all of us that the Constitution isn’t worth shit. That’s because it’s supposed to be a living, functioning document, and if it were, Cheney’s ass would be in a prison cell right now. But he’s on the national airwaves, promoting the goodness of torture, admitting that he ordered it, admitting that the Bush Cabal supported it. He can be brash because he knows that no one will challenge him.
Cheney is also showing all of us what a wimp Holder is (and, by extension, Obama as well). He’s pissing on Holder’s head just about every weekend, and Holder thinks it’s raining and starts looking for an umbrella.
Cheney also knows that Holder doesn’t deserve any respect because Holder is not challenging Cheney. Holder challenges Cheney when he appoints a special prosecutor, or when he indicts Cheney himself. But Holder is protecting all of his Democratic buddies because they, too, are guilty of complicity and conspiracy to commit war crimes. No one will be prosecuted. No one.
The shame will never end.
and bombing Hiroshima “saved” hundreds of thousands of lives
because lives are white and deaths are black
BULLSHIT
Cheney needs to be told he totally full of shit
Please President Obama, declare this jerk an enemy noncombatant, put a burlap sack over his head, ship him to Gitmo, and explain to him that thanks to his and George Bush’s legislation, he no longer has the right of habeas corpus.
No one will miss him except Sean Hannity and Rush
bobdevo–
“Please President Obama, declare this jerk an enemy noncombatant, put a burlap sack over his head, ship him to Gitmo, and explain to him that thanks to his and George Bush’s legislation, he no longer has the right of habeas corpus.
“No one will miss him except Sean Hannity and Rush”
Unfortunately, if Obama did that, the Alitos and Uncle Thomases would miraculously rediscover the principle of habeas corpus.
For those of you who don’t know, or are of short memory:
PNAC’s charter members included many figures who later held top positions under Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
If you don’t know about PNAC, Google it and read very thoroughly what that group stood for, and Cheney was a charter signer.
Pathetic 5 time Vietnam War deferments….Funny how those who were such chickenshits during Nam became so brave with OTHER people’s lives…but that’s typical….Look at Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity…Two other cowards that never served but are SO brave with other people’s lives….
Every time that Cheney appears and speaks in public he drives the stake a little deeper into the heart of the Republican party. He seems driven to shape the Bush legacy as single handedly as he did the Bush administration. That administration and its legacy began on 9/11. He has repeatedly used that event to paint a heroic picture of himself and his boss at the expense of the Constitution, long held treaties with other nations and the nation’s wallet. When the truth about the events of that day finally come out the sheer volume of cover up and intrigue will be staggering.
Cheney and the Legacy of Henry “Scoop” Jackson!
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=henry_jackson