Buchanan, Peters call Cheney speech "candid," "accurate" despite discredited claims
Despite several discredited claims made by former Vice President Dick Cheney during his May 21 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan subsequently referred to Cheney's remarks as "candid." Similarly, Fox News contributor Ralph Peters said of the speech, "every single point he raised was accurate. I am 100 percent behind him on this, because he's right." During his remarks, Cheney offered discredited assertions with respect to the relationship between interrogation techniques used at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison; whether detainees provided information without the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"; and whether Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair supports the use of those techniques.
For instance, Cheney claimed that "there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations." He continued: "At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men."
However, as Media Matters for America documented, contrary to Cheney's claim that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were unfairly compared, a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) concluded that "Special Mission Unit (SMU) Task Force (TF) interrogation policies were influenced by the Secretary of Defense's December 2, 2002 approval of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at GTMO [Guantánamo]. SMU TF interrogation policies in Iraq included the use of aggressive interrogation techniques such as military working dogs and stress positions. SMU TF policies were a direct cause of detainee abuse and influenced interrogation policies at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq."
The report also stated that "[i]nterrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO."
Moreover, Cheney suggested that detainees did not provide information before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used, claiming that those techniques "were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed." He later added that "with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all."
However, as Media Matters noted, former FBI agent Ali Soufan -- who interrogated Abu Zubaydah -- testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 13 about the success of non-harsh interrogation methods, which he contrasted with the "ineffective" harsh techniques. Soufan stated in his written testimony that "the Informed Interrogation Approach outlined in the Army Field Manual is the most effective, reliable, and speedy approach we have for interrogating terrorists. It is legal and has worked time and again." He continued: "It was a mistake to abandon it in favor of harsh interrogation methods that are harmful, shameful, slower, unreliable, ineffective, and play directly into the enemy's handbook."
Soufan pointed to "[t]he case of the terrorist Abu Zubaydah" as "a good example of where the success of the Informed Interrogation Approach can be contrasted with the failure of the harsh technique approach." Soufan then presented a "timeline" of the Zubaydah interrogation, which he said showed that "many of the claims made in the memos about the success of the enhanced techniques are inaccurate." He added: "For example, it is untrue to claim Abu Zubaydah wasn't cooperating before August 1, 2002. The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him."
Soufan also testified about other uses and successes of the informed interrogation approach. He stated that his interrogation of Osama bin Laden's former chief bodyguard, Nasser Ahmad Nasser al-Bahri, also known as Abu Jandal, was "done completely by the book (including advising him of his rights)," and that, from it, "we obtained a treasure trove of highly significant actionable intelligence."
