Cheney Admits Involvment in Authorizing Torture

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-cheney16-2008dec16,0,4343941.story

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics
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The vice president says that the use of waterboarding was appropriate
and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should stay open until
'the end of the war on terror.'
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By Greg Miller December 16, 2008

Reporting from Washington -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday
that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation
methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
should remain open indefinitely.

Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with
President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison,
although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming
administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged
playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of
controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning
method known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get
the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.

Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the
waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do."

His comments come on the heels of disclosures by a Senate committee
showing that high-level officials in the Bush administration were
intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation methods
that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned
internationally as torture.

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came
in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they
talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do.
And I supported it."

Waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner to a tilted surface,
covering his face with a towel and dousing it to simulate the
sensation of drowning.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency used the
technique on three Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. But the
practice was discontinued when lawyers from the Department of Justice
and other agencies began backing away from their opinions endorsing
its legality.

Cheney has long defended the technique. But he has not previously
disclosed his role in pushing to give the CIA such authority.

Cheney's office is regarded as the most hawkish presence in the Bush
administration, pushing the White House toward aggressive stances on
the invasion of Iraq and the wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

Asked when the Guantanamo Bay prison would be shut down, Cheney said,
"I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror." He
went on to say that "nobody can specify" when that might occur, and
likened the use of the detention facility to the imprisonment of
Germans during World War II.

"We've always exercised the right to capture the enemy and hold them
till the end of the conflict," Cheney said.

The administration's legal case for holding detainees indefinitely
has been eroded by a series of court rulings. Obama has pledged to
close the facility, which still holds 250 prisoners.

Cheney's remarks are the latest in a series of interviews granted by
Bush and senior officials defending their decisions as they prepare
to leave office. Bush recently said his main regret was that U.S. spy
agencies had been so mistaken about Iraq's alleged weapons programs.
Cheney and the Bush administration have been accused of
"cherry-picking" intelligence to support going to war with Iraq.

Cheney said that those mistakes didn't matter, and that the U.S.
invasion was justified by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's ability to
reestablish destructive weapons programs. The vice president brushed
off a series of findings questioning that view, including a 2006
Senate report concluding that Hussein lacked a "coherent effort" to
develop nuclear weapons and had only a "limited capability" for
chemical weapons.

"This was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's
better off, with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision
in spite of the fact that the original [intelligence] was off in some
of its major judgments," he said.

Miller is a writer in our Washington bureau.

greg.miller@latimes.com

~ by ulrichdebrus on December 22, 2008.