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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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June 3rd,
2009 - Cheney Led Briefings of Lawmakers To Defend Interrogation Techniques |
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Cheney Led
Briefings of Lawmakers To Defend Interrogation Techniques No Indication of Whether Waterboarding Was Discussed By Paul Kane & Joby Warrick Washington Post June 3, 2009 Former vice president
Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior
members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a
secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to
maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees. The Cheney-led briefings
came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional
oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the
techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and
former intelligence officials. Cheney's role in helping
handle intelligence issues in the Bush administration - particularly his
advocacy for the use of aggressive methods and warrantless wiretapping
against alleged terrorists - has been well documented. But his hands-on role
in defending the interrogation program to lawmakers has not been previously
publicized. The CIA made no mention of
his role in documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month that listed every
lawmaker who had been briefed on "enhanced interrogation
techniques" since 2002. For meetings that were overseen by Cheney, the
agency told the intelligence committees that information about who oversaw
those briefings was "not available." The revelations do not shed
light on whether top Democrats, as Republicans contend, were aware that
waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, was being used on
terrorism suspects as early as the fall of 2002. That discussion has
dominated Capitol Hill since last month, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.), who was not present at any of the briefings that included Cheney,
accused the agency of intentionally misleading her in a 2002 briefing about
the use of waterboarding. An official who witnessed
one of Cheney's briefing sessions with lawmakers said the vice president's
presence appeared calculated to give additional heft to the CIA's case for
maintaining the program. Cheney left it to the professional briefers to
outline the interrogation practices, while he mounted an impassioned defense
of the program. "This is a really
important issue for the security of the United States," the official
recalled Cheney saying. The CIA declined to comment
on why Cheney's presence in some meetings was left out of the records. One
senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said
the names of individual briefers are omitted in all cases - they do not
appear in any of the public documents that describe congressional briefings.
In at least some cases, he added, the identity of the briefer was never
recorded in the agency's records. For all but seven of the 40
meetings listed, however, the documents outlined which agency led the
briefing and which provided support. And on at least five occasions, they
spelled out that then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden led the classified
meetings. Since leaving office in
January, Cheney has mounted a vigorous public defense of the interrogation
practices. Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, he said CIA
officials approached the White House in 2002 with the request to use harsher
techniques such as waterboarding. "We all approved it.
I'm a strong believer in it. I think it was the right thing to do," said
Cheney, who is now pushing for the declassification of the information gained
from the detainees who were subjected to the most brutal techniques. Several members of Congress
who took part in the Cheney meetings declined to comment on them, citing
secrecy concerns. But there was little doubt that he was leading the charge
on the issue. "His office was ground
zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day," recalled
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who jousted with Cheney over the system of
interrogations. One of the most critical
Cheney-led briefings came in late October 2005, when the vice president and
Porter J. Goss, then director of the CIA, read Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
into the program on the interrogation methods, according to congressional and
intelligence sources. One knowledgeable official
described the meeting as contentious. Cheney and Goss, with other CIA officials
present, tried to persuade the former Vietnam POW to back off an anti-torture
amendment that had already won the support of 90 senators. The McCain amendment would
have ended practices such as waterboarding by forbidding "cruel,
degrading and inhumane" treatment of detainees. The CIA had not used
waterboarding since 2003, but the White House sought to maintain the ability
to employ it. In the meetings with
lawmakers, Cheney was adamant that the enhanced interrogations were needed to
preserve national security, according to two participants. He advocated
briefing more lawmakers about the program, against the wishes of National
Security Council officials who sought to inform only the top members of the
intelligence committees. Lawmakers at times challenged
Cheney and CIA officials about the legality of the program and pressed for
specific results that would show whether the techniques worked. In response,
the CIA briefers said that half of the agency's knowledge about al-Qaeda's
plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations. Before the McCain briefing,
Cheney met with a friendlier audience, his longtime friends Sens. Thad
Cochran (R-Miss.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who oversaw the Pentagon's
annual spending bill, to which the McCain amendment was attached. Cochran
said yesterday that it was the first time he had been given a full
description of what waterboarding entailed. "I found the
conversation with the vice president to be very candid, straightforward,
helpful," Cochran said. CIA records indicate that
another briefing - for which the briefer's name is "not available" -
was given to Senate GOP leaders on Nov. 1, 2005. That was the same day Cheney
made a regular appearance at the weekly Tuesday luncheon for Senate
Republicans. Cheney usually engaged only in brief, quiet asides with senators
at the lunches. But at this meeting - the day before The Washington Post
published a detailed account of the CIA's secret overseas prison system -
Cheney rose to speak, and the room was cleared of all staff. He discussed the value of
the interrogation program and the information gleaned by using the harsh
techniques, according to numerous contemporaneous media accounts. Cheney's briefings on
interrogations began in the winter of 2005 as the top Democrats on the Senate
and House intelligence committees, Sen. John D. Rockefeller III (W.Va.) and
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), publicly advocated a full-scale investigation of
the tactics used against top al-Qaeda suspects. On March 8, 2005 - two days
after a detailed report in the New York Times about interrogations - Cheney
gathered Rockefeller, Harman and the chairmen of the intelligence panels,
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), according to current
and former intelligence officials. Weeks earlier, Roberts had given public
statements suggesting possible support for the investigation sought by
Rockefeller. But by early March 2005, Roberts announced that he opposed a
separate probe, and the matter soon died. Cheney's efforts to sway
Congress toward supporting waterboarding went beyond secret meetings in
Washington. In July 2005, he sent David S. Addington, his chief counsel at
the time, to travel with five senators - four of them opponents of the CIA
interrogation methods - to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On the trip, Sen. Graham
urged Addington to put the interrogations at secret prisons and the use of
military tribunals into a stronger constitutional position by pushing
legislation through Congress, rather than relying on executive orders and
secret rulings from Justice Department lawyers. Subsequent court rulings
would challenge the legality of the system, and Justice Department lawyers
were privately drafting new rules on interrogations. Addington dismissed the
views of Graham, who had been a military lawyer. "I've got all the
authority I need right here," Addington said, pulling from his coat a
pocket-size copy of the Constitution, according to the senator, suggesting
there was no doubt about the system's legal footing. Staff researcher Julie Tate
contributed to this report. © 2009 The Washington Post
Company External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060203999.html |