Washington Post Editorial: 'Mr. Cheney's Distortions/New York Times Editorial: Dick Cheney’s Version

Washington Post Editorial: 'Mr. Cheney's Distortions - The former vice president sees politics and broken promises behind a probe of possible CIA abuses. Not so.
Copyright by The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/01/AR2009090103490.html


ON "FOX NEWS Sunday," former vice president Richard B. Cheney assailed the Obama administration for directing a prosecutor to conduct a preliminary inquiry into possible CIA abuses of terrorism suspects. Mr. Cheney asserted that President Obama had flip-flopped on an earlier promise to shield participants from liability. "We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn't be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration," Mr. Cheney told host Chris Wallace. "Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're reversing course on that."

That's not how it happened. In April, the administration released and repudiated a handful of Bush Justice Department memos blessing an array of interrogation techniques that bordered on or constituted torture. "For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted," Mr. Obama said at the time in a statement echoed by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The officials left open the possibility that those who engaged in behavior not sanctioned by the Justice Department could be legally vulnerable. The preliminary inquiry launched Aug. 24 makes real that possibility and focuses only on some 10 cases in which CIA operatives appear to have strayed beyond the limits of the Justice Department memos.

Mr. Cheney is right when he argues that these incidents already have been investigated; prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia and at Justice Department headquarters looked into the abuse allegations and concluded that prosecution was warranted in only one case, involving a CIA contractor. Under normal circumstances, that would and should be the end of the matter. Yet Mr. Cheney is wrong to argue that only partisan politics on the part of the Obama administration can explain the decision to reopen the cases. If anything, the politicization of the Justice Department during the Bush years is to blame for the need for further investigation to ensure that the decision not to prosecute was justified.

Absent a truth commission to conduct a broader review of detainee policy -- which we continue to think would be the best approach -- Mr. Holder was right to call for a reexamination of these cases. Several detainees died in U.S. custody after undergoing interrogations; even though some of the deaths were ruled homicides, they have largely gone unpunished.

We trust that special prosecutor John H. Durham, a respected Justice Department veteran, will review all of the facts, apply the law without fear or favor and bring good judgment to bear in making a decision. This is, unfortunately, more than we could say about the Justice Department during Mr. Cheney's watch.



New York Times Editorial: Dick Cheney’s Version
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03thu1.html?th&emc=th


After the C.I.A. inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage — not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation.

In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

Mr. Cheney was at the center of each of these insults to this country’s Constitution, its judicial system and its bedrock democratic values. To defend himself, he offers a twisted version of history:

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He says Mr. Bush’s Justice Department determined that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” ordered by the president were legal under American law and international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.

In reality, those opinions were based on a corrupt and widely discredited legal analysis cooked up after the White House had already decided to use long-banned practices like waterboarding. Mr. Cheney was an architect of the decision to “get tough” with prisoners, as the bureaucrats often say to soften the outrage of this policy.

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He insists the inspector general’s findings were “completely reviewed” by the Justice Department and that any follow-up investigation would be improper and unnecessary.

In reality, Mr. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, did not appoint an independent investigator after receiving the inspector general’s report, which was completed in 2004. The Justice Department decided there was only one narrow case worth pursuing, involving a civilian contractor — hardly a surprise from a thoroughly politicized department whose top officials set the very rules they were supposed to be judging. Mr. Gonzales’s team did not look into allegations that some interrogators broke those rules. Mr. Cheney may not care about that, but Mr. Holder rightly does.

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Mr. Cheney claims that waterboarding and other practices widely considered to be torture or abuse “were absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Cheney is right when he says detainees who were subject to torture and abuse gave up valuable information. But the men who did the questioning flatly dispute that it was duress that moved them to do so.

Deuce Martinez, the C.I.A. officer who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, engineer of the 9/11 mass murders, said he used traditional interrogation methods, and not the infliction of pain and panic. And, in an article on the Times Op-Ed page, Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who oversaw the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, another high-ranking terrorist, denounced “the false claims” about harsh interrogations. Mr. Soufan said Mr. Zubaydah talked before he was subjected to waterboarding and other abuse. He also said that “using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions.”

Every week, it seems, new disclosures about this sordid history dribble out. This week, Physicians for Human Rights analyzed what the inspector general’s report said about the involvement of C.I.A. physicians and psychiatrists in the abuse of prisoners. It said they not only monitored torture, like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reaction in ways that “may amount to human experimentation.”

Getting at the truth is not going to be easy. The C.I.A. destroyed evidence — videotapes of interrogations — and is now refusing to release its records of the questioning of its prisoners. It also is asking the courts to keep secret the orders Mr. Bush gave authorizing the interrogations, and the original Justice Department memos concluding that they were legal.

Americans need much more than glimpses of the truth. They should not have to decide whether to believe former interrogators, whom they do not know, or Mr. Cheney, who did not hesitate while in office to mislead them when it suited his political aims.