Cheney: Spanish torture probe ‘abhorrent’

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Friday, May 8, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his excuses-for-torture tour today with an interview on a radio station in Fargo.

Perhaps needless to say, he’s not exactly praising the new administration.

From MSNBC:

“There are two documents in particular that I personally have read and know about that are still classified in that National Archives,” Cheney said. ”But I’ve asked that they be de-classified; I made that request over a month ago on March 31st. What those documents show is the success, especially of the interrogation program in terms of what it produced by way of intelligence that let us track down members of Al-Qaeda and disrupt their plans and plots to strike the United States. It’s all there in black and white…It demonstrates conclusively the worth of those programs. As I say, I’ve asked the administration to de-classify them and so far they have not.”

[...]

He warned that [an investigation] would have future consequences.

“Anybody who sees that kind of thing happen is going to pull their head in, and they’ll be reluctant to take responsibility for anything,” he said, adding, “I hear this talk that there is going to be some kind of foreign prosecution of our guys, I just think that’s abhorrent, and I think they ought to do everything they can to fight that.”

Of course, Cheney’s position that torture “works” has been completely discredited.

The New York Times reported that military trainers at Guantanamo in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart created from a 1957 Air Force study on Communist Chinese methods.

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The harsh questioning techniques were used by the Chinese to obtain confessions from American prisoners, including many false ones, the daily reported.

The chart, made public at a June 17, 2008 US Senate hearing, detailed the effects of “coercive management techniques” such as “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

“These were techniques to get false confessions,” US Senator Carl Levin was quoted as saying in the Times.

“People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence,” he said.

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