From The Onion:
In The Know panelists discuss the closing of the controversial detainee labyrinth and debate whether the Minotaur's sternum-stomping-by-hooves interrogation technique yielded valuable intelligence.
h/t C&L'er Stupid Git
I'm not sure what's more infuriating here, listening to Orrin Hatch pretend he doesn't know full well that what was done to the prisoners in our custody was torture, or John Kerry defending the Obama administration's decision not to go after the ones at the top who ordered it, and then smile and nod politely while Hatch spins.
STEPHANOPOULOS: OK. Let me move to another issue that came up earlier this week. The attorney general decided to investigate possible CIA abuses in the prisoner interrogation cases.
And Vice President Cheney this morning has blasted that decision by the attorney general.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping the country safe over that period of time?
Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening, contrary to what the president originally said, they were going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: He called it an outrageous and possibly dangerous act.
KERRY: Well, Dick Cheney has shown through the years, frankly, a disrespect for the Constitution, for sharing of information with Congress, respect for the law, and I'm not surprised that he is upset about this.
The Obama administration has no intention -- I think the president himself has been unbelievably bending in the direction of trying to be careful about what happens to national security, protecting our national security interests, being very sensitive about the CIA's prerogatives and needs and so forth.
And in fact, I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is.
And in a sense, that's good. That's appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do.
And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other interests.
Conservative columnist George Will has joined many who are calling for a commission to investigate the use of enhanced interrogation techiniques. "We ought to have a commission. Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post suggests this morning, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter, bring them down, set it up and answer some factual questions," said Will.
The Washington Post does the most insidious form of "journalism" today: they do an "on the other hand" story about torture. "Some say" it's wrong, but "others say" it works, so the implied conclusion is, how can it be wrong?
And therein lies the problem. Why does it matter? After eight years or so of deceptive leadership and an inbred corporate media corps eager to lend its imprimatur, we have gotten to the point where we're actually arguing that torture is okay if it works.
Life is full of challenges and dilemmas, but morally aware people don't take to the low road when they have to deal with them. For instance, I'm worried about paying for my COBRA coverage. If I could rob a bank and get away with it, would that be okay? Of course not.
And can I point out again that the most useful intelligence we got from detainees was because their interrogators were kind to them?
These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.
The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate.
Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.
"What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that."
Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.
"During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time," he said.
Critics say waterboarding and other harsh methods are unacceptable regardless of their results, and those with detailed knowledge of the CIA's program say the existing assessments offer no scientific basis to draw conclusions about effectiveness.
"Democratic societies don't use torture under any circumstances. It is illegal and immoral," said Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International. "This is a fool's argument in any event. There is no way to prove or disprove the counterfactual."
(h/t Michael.)
Well, well, well. Isn't this interesting:
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not capture or kill any terrorist suspects.
The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the new C.I.A. director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.
It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.
Officials said that the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.
A new report in the Washington Post reveals that some interrogators threatened to quit over harsh methods used in interrogations. Joby Warrick talks with MSNBC's Chris Jansen.
"There was some push and pull that came from surprising places within the CIA as the interrogation program was going forward, including from some of the interrogators themselves whose resistance to things like sleep deprivation and nudity in the beginning -- and when waterboarding started some interrogators revolted and said, after four, five days, they refused to do this, some threatened to quit," explained Warrick.
While I was away for almost two weeks, the ACLU and many of my blogger pals took to their keyboards and wrote about the many brutal deaths that occurred at the hands of people engaging in torture for the US. The torture issue is horrifying and the longer we get away from the Bush years, the more information the ACLU is able to gather. These documents are, in a word, vile.
The ACLU writes:
Today, several prominent bloggers are writing about detainees who died in U.S. custody, using documents released through the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. We’re not talking suicide, or death by "natural causes." No, this is death as a result of torture and abuse while in custody. This effort comes on the eve of the release — we hope — of the CIA Inspector General’s report on waterboarding. (You might’ve heard last Friday that the release was delayed.)
At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:
The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others — because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we Look to the Future, not the Past — are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.
Marcy Wheeler focuses on the case of detainee 04-309:
Now I’m no doctor–and I definitely can’t make sense of the cardiac findings. But it sounds like "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," "walling," and "water dousing" are all leading candidates to have caused the death of 04-309.
Drational at Daily Kos zeroes in on one detainee, known as Habibullah, and the circumstances of his death.
Why is it that, on the issues that count (Iraq, torture, FISA, secrecy), this administration is so much like the previous one? It really makes me wonder:
The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.
In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.
The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.
Although Panetta's statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA's interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush's presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush's critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.
Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.
Panetta argued that none of the 65 CIA documents immediately at issue, which the ACLU has sought for several years in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, should be released. He asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration's release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA's desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.
He said that while the Justice Department memos discussed harsh interrogation "in the abstract," the CIA information was "of a qualitatively different nature" because it described the interrogation techniques "as applied in actual operations."
You have to hand it to those hypocritical Republicans. They are once again controlling this debate because they and their little media enablers keep changing the subject from torture to whether torture is efficient.
Is that really the debate we want to be having in the United States of America? I'm sure there are still are some immoral techniques we haven't used yet. Is it okay to start, on the off chance that they work?
Republicans ignited a firestorm of controversy on Thursday by revealing some of what they had been told at a closed-door Intelligence Committee hearing on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.
The Republicans who gave on-the-record interviews were Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Rep. John Kline.
Democrats immediately blasted the GOP lawmakers for publicly discussing classified information, while Republicans said Democrats are trying to hide the truth that enhanced interrogation of detainees is effective.
GOP members on the Intelligence Committee on Thursday told The Hill in on-the-record interviews that they were informed that the controversial methods have led to information that prevented terrorist attacks.
[...] “I am absolutely shocked that members of the Intelligence committee who attended a closed-door hearing … then walked out that hearing — early, by the way — and characterized anything that happened in that hearing,” said Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairwoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “My understanding is that’s a violation of the rules. It may be more than that.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said, “Members on both sides need to watch what they say.”
Both Schakowsky and Reyes accused GOP members of playing politics with national security.
“I think they are playing a very dangerous game when it comes to the discussion of matters that were sensitive enough to be part of a closed hearing,” Schakowsky said.
This isn't the first time Hoekstra has done this, either. From ABC News in 2007:
For the second time in as many weeks, a senior House Republican may have divulged classified information in the media.
In an opinion article published in the New York Post Thursday, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., reported the top-secret budget for human spying had decreased -- the type of detail normally kept under wraps for national security reasons.
"The 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill cut human-intelligence programs," Hoekstra wrote in the piece, in which he also criticized "leaks to the news media."
Formerly the chairman of the intelligence committee, Hoekstra is now its highest ranking Republican. In its recent budget authorizations, that committee kept from public view all figures and most discussion of spending on such classified items as human spying. Hoekstra's apparent slip was first noted on the liberal Web site, Raw Story.
"If Mr. Hoekstra wants to break ranks and disclose that information, that's fine with me," said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert who has long pushed to declassify overall spending on intelligence. "But it is the sort of thing he has harshly criticized in the past."
Indeed, Hoekstra's penchant for openness appears to be selective. He has aggressively attacked unnamed opponents guilty of such leaking, accusing them of "recklessly and illegally" disclosing secrets "for political or other motives" in reports published by his committee.
He's even exacted punishment for suspected transgressions. Last October, Hoekstra stripped the credentials of a Democratic committee aide he believed may have leaked a then-classified document to The New York Times. A month later, he quietly reinstated the aide's access.
What do we say, boys and girls? "It's okay if you're a Republican!"
You know, if I hadn't been a reporter and didn't know how heavily politicized (and blind to actual justice) most prosecutors are, I might actually swallow this horse hooey:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has overturned a long-standing ruling that stops police from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present, a move that will make it easier for prosecutors to interrogate suspects.
The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present.
The Michigan ruling applied even to defendants who agree to talk to the authorities without their lawyers.
There's a good reason for this. In case you haven't noticed, criminals are rarely intelligent and they're often easily coerced. You know that bit on cop shows where they use a copy machine as a "lie detector"? Some cops actually do that.
The court's conservatives overturned that opinion Tuesday, with Justice Antonin Scalia saying "it was poorly reasoned, has created no significant reliance interests and (as we have described) is ultimately unworkable."
Scalia, who read the opinion from the bench, said their decision will have a "minimal" effects on criminal defendants. "Because of the protections created by this court in Miranda and related cases, there is little if any chance that a defendant will be badgered into waiving his right to have counsel present during interrogation," Scalia said.
I don't know where Scalia grew up, but apparently his life experience is very different from mine! I knew too many kids who got arrested and coerced into confessions to give this much credence.
The Michigan v. Jackson opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time. He dissented from the ruling, and in an unusual move read his dissent aloud from the bench. It was the first time this term a justice had read a dissent aloud.
"The police interrogation in this case clearly violated petitioner's Sixth Amendment right to counsel," Stevens said. Overruling the Jackson case, he said, "can only diminish the public's confidence in the reliability and fairness of our system of justice."
Don't worry, Justice Stevens. We lost confidence in the "reliability and fairness of our system of justice" a long time ago!
The long-awaited debate over Dick Cheney's lust for torture finally took place between Lawrence O'Donnell and Mini Cheney on ABC's Good Morning America last week.
Mini Cheney is just as slick as her father when it comes to throwing out the right-wing canards on torture, and she has avoided most people who have a good grasp of the facts when she goes on the air. The fact that wingers are getting a lot of airtime to reargue their position is helpful to them because they play the word games very well. The Luntzification Effect has reaped huge rewards for them in the last decade.
Transcript via ABC:
CHRIS CUOMO: Couldn't have a more important question, really. So, let's continue this debate. We're joined by Liz Cheney, former State Department official and, of course, daughter of former Vice President Cheney and Lawrence O'Donnell, former Senate Democratic chief of staff, live from Los Angeles. Thank you to you both for being here.
LIZ CHENEY: Great to be here. Thank you, Chris.
CUOMO: So, let's get to the big question. Liz, I'll start with you. Why are we as Americans less safe right now because of President Obama's philosophy?
CHENEY: Well, I think it's in part because of his actions. I think taking the step of releasing the legal memos that laid out in great detail exactly what techniques we used in our enhanced interrogation program gave, as my dad said yesterday, the terrorists a new insert for their training manual. We know former Director of National Intelligence Mike Hayden has explained, we know that terrorists train to these techniques, so it's one thing to say we're not going to do them anymore, which as a policy is the President's right to do. But, then to take the step and say we're releasing all this information, you know, I think very clearly makes us less safe. It takes a tool out of the toolbox for every former president or future president.CUOMO: Mr. O'Donnell, is the President's instinct to play nice putting us at risk?
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL (Fmr. Senate Democratic chief of staff): Well, you know, the interesting thing about Liz and her dad's position is that a releasing of a memo has made the country less safe and so the Cheney family suggestion is now to release more of it. So, you know, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that if we release classified information it makes us less safe and now let's release more of it. That's their position and the funny thing is that Dick Cheney's argument and Liz's argument with the Obama administration is really an argument that began in the Bush administration when Dick Cheney started to lose the fights in house. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed in practices under the Obama administration.
CHENEY: You know- It's absolutely- That's actually not true, Lawrence. No. Well, Lawrence-
For some time now, Bill O'Reilly has been so desperate to prove that the Bush administration's use of extreme tactics in the "war on terror" -- including torturing detainees and killing civilians -- that he's even been willing to smear the memories of American veterans of World War II to make that point. Last night on his Fox News show, he added Winston Churchill to the list of smear victims.
We all remember the Malmedy smear, for which O'Reilly has never either apologized or corrected the record:
In Malmedy, as you know, U.S. forces captured S.S. forces who had their hands in the air and were unarmed and they shot them dead, you know that. That's on the record. And documented."
O'Reilly in fact had it completely reversed: At Malmedy, it was American troops who were massacred by SS guards, not the other way around.
Not only did O'Reilly never correct the insulting gaffe, a year later he repeated it:
In Malmedy, as you know, U.S. forces captured SS forces who had their hands in the air, and they were unarmed, and they shot them down. You know that. That’s on the record, been documented. In Iwo Jima, the same thing occurred. Japanese attempted to surrender, and they were burned in their caves.
O’Reilly also engages in historical revisionism with his explanation that the small number of Japanese POWs at Iwo Jima and other Pacific battles is proof that U.S. Marines committed systematic murder. According to most historical accounts, the Americans wanted the Japanese soldiers to surrender but they chose to fight to the death.
So last night he wandered into the same waters, claiming that Winston Churchill was likely a war criminal under the standards "the far left" wants to impose on the Bush administration. What started all this was President Obama citing Winston Churchill's views on torture:
O'Reilly: And since then, the Factor has been investigating Winston Churchill's position on waging war and interrogating the enemy. Via Boston University professor Cathal Nolan, we have found out the following:
Churchill actually wanted to use poison gas on the Germans in violation of the Geneva Convention, but was stopped by the British War Cabinet.
The Royal Air Force killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians by targeting non-military sites.
And the British operated a number of military interrogation centers during and after World War II, including one called the "London Cage," where German prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death.
Another center was opened in Bad Nenndorf on German soil after Churchill left power. It was almost like a concentration camp. British government documents detailed terrible torture inflicted on the Germans. Some of the inmates were branded human skeletons.
Well, is O'Reilly right? Er, as you might expect given his track record -- No.
It's not as egregious a smear as the Malmedy/Iwo Jima claims, but close.
From C-SPAN's Newsmakers April 26, 2009. Pete Hoekstra denies that the interrogation methods used by the CIA were built from the SERE program, and he's just not all that concerned about whether they originated with communist regimes and were designed to get false confessions from the prisoners being waterboarded.
Shane: Does it bother you at all that these methods were borrowed from the military SERE training program, which was created, grew out of a military program created in the 1950's based on Chinese communist interrogation methods which were studied because they had produced false confessions. American pilots who'd been captured after enduring these kinds of methods had given false confessions. And in those days it was called torture. So the program was essentially based on communist torture methods which were known to have produced false confessions. Isn't that a sort of odd basis on which to build an interrogation program?
Hoekstra: Well I wouldn't say that that's what this interrogation program was built on. I think what this interrogation program was built on was a broad collection of taking a look at how interrogations have been done. How they've been done, you know, how they're done in a law enforcement mechanism here within the United States. How they've been used and administered through other conflicts, through other wars. Who used what and as you went through this whole process the people that were responsible for developing this regime of interrogation that were eventually approved and implemented both through the Executive branch and in many cases were reviewed by Congress and approved by Congress that they were then put into effect.
I'm not necessarily worried about what technique came from what type of previous use of interrogation. It is whether the interrogation that we were going to put into a program, whether from a legal stand point we believed that we met US law. And the second thing is whether we believed that they would be effective. And the administration and others that looked at this program, looked at the techniques, reached a conclusion that number one they were consistent with US law and secondly reached a conclusion that they would be effective in getting information for America.
Just what US law condones waterboarding Congressman? Or any of the other techniques that were being used by the CIA on prisoners at Gitmo or these black sites? Isn't the fact that we used waterboarding on our military in the SERE program what you and your cohorts keep continually citing as the justification for why waterboarding is not torture? But when someone points out the reason the SERE program was put in place and where it came from, now you're going to try to put some distance between the two. Isn't that special?
He then is asked what the Democrats should have done had any of them had objections to the program. His answer. They should have reported it to...themselves! Or if that didn't get them anywhere, the President. I seem to remember Jello Jay Rockefeller doing something along that line with his hand written note to Darth Cheney. A lot of good that did him.
Later in the show they commented on Rep. Hoekstra requesting a list of all of the Democrats and the dates that they were briefed on the interrogation methods. I guess that's the next round of theater we can expect from the House floor once he gets it.
Of course the big elephant in the room that isn't being talked about is that false confessions were exactly what they were looking for to justify invading Iraq. And since the media was complicit in that as well, we're not going to hear that from them.
Sometimes Andrea Mitchell can be a tool, but sometimes she acts like a journalist. Kit Bond was on a wanker role today on MSNBC and actually had Andrea Mitchell almost jumping out of her seat with his distortions of so many facts. Bond said that the Senate Armed Services Report was a partisan report and it was wrong. When he tried to say that Abu Ghraib was just a few rogue soldiers that's when Andrea got into it with him.
Senate armed services committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the harsh interrogation programme of the CIA and abuses of prisoners at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
When Andrea brought this fact up to Kit, he called the SASC report lies...( rough transcript. Fill in the thread)
Mitchell: Do you really feel that the CIA/terror fighters are being stabbed in the back by the President's actions?
Bond: Yes, very clearly. by released these classified has put all the CIA under the gun.There could be prosecutions for following orders and there could be prosecutions in other countries.
Mitchell: ...the Bush administration lawyers, one a sitting federal judge, on the federal appeals court on the 9th circuit in San Francisco, so those legal opinions themselves are being questioned, the practice is being questioned, the chain of how these decisions led eventually to Abu Ghraib according to the Armed Services Committee report yesterday and your own committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released a time line that shows that Condi Rice and others as early as July, 2002 approved these techniques, your colleagues have done on the hill.
Bond: There are about five different questions in there. No 1, Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with intelligence, that was a bunch of rogue reservists from West Virginia
Mitchell: That's not what what the Armed Services Committee report says sir.
Bond: It's absolutely wrong. It is a DOD report, they did not have access to the classified information on Intelligence community and we will be doing a review of the intelligence committee. It did not , it did not have access to what the CIA was doing. To say that Abu Ghraib had anything to do with intelligence is flat wrong.
Mitchell: So you're saying the Armed Services Committee report was in error yesterday?
Isn't it wonderful that Dick Cheney has now taken over as the leader of the Republican Party? They've been running around headless and look who comes to save them. I'm sure many conservatives are just delighted that he's going out in public, front and center and taking care of things for them.
In his Fox News interview with Sean Hannity -- the second half of which ran last night -- he trotted out an attack narrative against President Obama, essentially agreeing with Hannity that he's installing "socialism," and calling Obama's stimulus plan "devastating" for the economy.
Evidently, he's hoping that going on the attack will make the public forget about the current economic situation, which we would only politely call "devastating."
We always knew Cheney was a con artist -- how else did he get to be vice president, after all? -- but the Hannity interviews have been a disgusting performance.
The night before, thought he was quite the smart ex-VP when he called for the declassification of other intelligence that he thinks will prove to America once and for all: Torture is grand!
“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up till now, 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.”
Obviously, Cheney's say-so is not exactly credible (after all, this is the guy who told the public "there's no doubt" Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction). But that really isn't the point. Torture is illegal, period.
I get his game, though. He's running a con on the media and the public. He's betting on the idea that certain intelligence will never be declassified for a wide variety of reasons, so he knows that by shooting his mouth off with these demands he's probably safe. They will never come to light. Very shrewd, but he's the VICE.
