Calling bluffs

Cheney Calls for Release of Memos Showing Results of Interrogation Efforts

Now that the memos showing the rulings of interrogation techniques have been released, the Obama administration should release additional documents that show what the interrogations yielded, former Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News on Monday.
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Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Gee, Cheney went and spouted off like a tough guy to Sean Hannity about how he knows for sure waterboarding was effective. I'm sure that this story is not going to have an obvious conclusion at all.

A CIA inspector general's report from May 2004 that is set to be declassified by the Obama White House will almost certainly disprove claims that waterboarding was only used in controlled circumstances with effective results.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported the impending release of a May 7, 2004 IG report that, the paper added, would show that in several circumstances the techniques used to interrogate terrorist suspects "appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture" and did not produce desired results. It is difficult, the report will conclude, "to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks."
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The important things to take away from the footnote seem clear: for a period of time interrogators were using the waterboard with a "frequency and cumulative use" that had to be toned down. Moreover, they were doing it in a way that was determined to not be "efficacious."

Cheney....lying? Waterboarding....not effective? Obvious conclusions....obviously concluded? World....spinning....out...of...control. Nothing....makes sense. How could The Dick have lied to us? How could a technique that the Chinese, Cambodians and Spanish Inquisition to elicit false confessions for political purposes turn out to have caused false confessions? How come calling something 'enhanced interrogation' doesn't magically make it not torture? I thought we all knew waterboarding was effective when we learned they had to do it 100 times in one month to a guy. Surely it must be effective if you have to do it so many times to the same guy. I'm just so shocked at all of this I can barely shake my head in disgust over the state of affairs in this country, nor am I able to even to imbue my cries of "arrest this fucking vice-cretin" (replete with menacing finger point) with the necessary venom.

I mean how could a bunch of professional liars with no understanding of torture, the techniques they were approving, their historical uses, international law, torture law, US law, oversight, effectiveness, restraint, basic human decency, who were also reading constant reports about the ineffectiveness of these techniques, ever get it so wrong? It all seems so foolproof.