Dick Cheney Says CIA Torture Report Is 'Full Of Crap' -- Then Admits He Hasn't Read It

from the judging-a-book-by-its-cover dept

It's no secret that those most closely responsible for the CIA's torture program are pulling out all the stops to attack the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the program, trying out a variety of defenses from "it actually saved lives" to "it's just a partisan hack job." So it should come as no surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the cable TV news appearances to help attack the report. After all, many have argued that the real person behind the torture program was Cheney and his staff -- and to date, Cheney has insisted that everything that was done was perfectly reasonable and he'd do it again. Thus there's no surprise when Cheney appears on Fox News (because, of course), to claim that the report is "a bunch of hooey" and "full of crap" and "deeply flawed" only to then admit " I haven't read the report."

Wait, what?

Even the Fox News interviewer was taken aback -- and Cheney must have realized how stupid he looked, because he then tried to backtrack, arguing that he hadn't read "all 6,000 pages," but then saying he'd read "parts of it" and "summaries." Yes, we've all read "summaries." But some of us have sat down to read the whole 500 pages (minus the redacted bits, of course). You would hope that if Cheney was going on TV to respond to questions about the report that he might have done so as well, rather than just repeating the talking points handed out to folks associated with the program. Apparently not.

From there, Cheney shifted over to his other key talking point -- one that is entirely debunked by the report itself:

“How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?”

Yeah, great. Except the report makes it fairly clear that many of the people tortured had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. In fact, the only real "revelations" from the torture program was that the CIA torturers concluded that the people being tortured really didn't have any relevant information. Furthermore, the "how nice do you want to be" line is incredibly revealing and disturbing, because it sets up an unending war. What's to stop millions of people angry at America from justifying new terrorist attacks on us based on "how nice do you want to be to torturers from America?"

No one was saying that we should buddy up with the people responsible for 9/11, but to pretend the only other option is to torture many innocent people is psychopathic.

It won't surprise anyone, really, that Cheney will defend the torture program that he oversaw. But his comments here are sickening and should be quite eye-opening about the level of cognitive dissonance from the powerful people who were responsible for this incredibly shameful period in US history.

Filed Under: cia, dick cheney, torture, torture report

Cheney Biographer, Fox News Contributor Put On DHS Terrorist Watchlist; Harry Reid's Spokesperson Says It's No Big Deal

from the oh-really? dept

Stephen Hayes, who is the official biographer of former Vice President Dick Cheney and who also authored an entire book promoting dubious claims that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had a close working relationship, is the sort of person who basically seems to support nearly all of our government's excesses in the supposed "war on terror." So, as some people noted, there seems to be a bit of irony in the fact that he has ended up on the DHS Terrorist Watchlist.

As we've discussed, the recently leaked guidelines about how you get on the watchlist shows that it's incredibly (and ridiculously) vague. It can be summed up as "someone at DHS thinks you did anything that might possibly be suspect, so onto the watchlist you go." That's why nearly half of the people on the list have no actual terrorist affiliation.

As for how Hayes ended up on the list, he claims it's because he recently booked a one-way flight to Istanbul for a cruise, returning to the US from Athens a few weeks later. Indeed, that seems likely. Marcy Wheeler has been pointing out for a while that one of the criteria to be put on the watchlist is merely "travel... to a locus of TERRORIST ACTIVITY" and apparently Istanbul counts.

In fact, Spencer Ackerman, at the Guardian, actually got US officials to quietly admit that those reports you've heard of 100 Americans "fighting for ISIS" is an almost entirely bogus claim based entirely on Americans who "travelled to Syria or attempted to travel to Syria over the past 18 months." In other words, if you're an American and you happened to travel to or near Syria, the US government claims you're fighting for ISIS -- even if, say, you went to provide humanitarian aid or to fight against ISIS. The US government doesn't care. Onto the "terrorist" list you go.

Speaking of not caring, when asked about Hayes being placed on the watchlist, Senator Harry Reid's long-time spokesperson (who previously worked for Senator Ted Kennedy) gave a "who cares?" response:

I have no idea and frankly don't really care why [a] Bush/Cheney apologist ended up on a TSA watch list -- Senator Kennedy was on a list as well

That is... an absolutely ridiculous response, and shows just how out of touch those in power have become. The proper response is that if people like both Stephen Hayes and Ted Kennedy are ending up on a terrorist watchlist something is seriously screwed up with that list and the process to get people on the list. Besides, isn't it a little disturbing that a person in power on one side of the traditional political spectrum shrugs off the government putting someone at the other end of that spectrum on a terrorist watchlist?

No one's legitimately worried about any harm done to Hayes for being on that list. He's going through the motions to get off the list, which I'm sure will work out just fine. Because he's white and a person of some influence with connections to famous politicians. But, as we've covered, if you happen to be Muslim, and happen to be put on the list it's nearly impossible to get off. Even if you're politically connected, being Muslim means that you can be put on a watchlist here in the US.

At some point you have to ask what is the point of all of this. It doesn't seem to be about making us any safer.

Filed Under: dhs, dick cheney, harry reid, homeland security, isis, james manley, stephen hayes, terrorist watchlist, travel, tsa, tsdb

The Three Big Lies: How The Federal Government Kept Its Post-9/11 Spying On Americans A Secret

from the three-big-lies dept

Last night, the first episode of Frontline's United States of Secrets aired, going deep into the history of "The Program," which is what the Bush (really Cheney) White House referred to the NSA program to spy on Americans based on incredibly shaky legal theories -- theories that were locked in a safe in Michael Hayden's office at the NSA, which almost no one was allowed to see. If you want additional background or summaries of the episode, Monday night's Fresh Air was great, including interviews with both the director of the program as well as Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe -- two NSA whistleblowers (who we've mentioned before) who had their lives turned upside down due to totally bogus FBI raids, which were clearly a response to their whistleblowing activities. Another great summary comes from PRI's The World.

Either way, the thing that stands out to me is how the administration tried, desperately to stop anyone from revealing "The Program" with three big lies, which are discussed in all three of the links above. Here's the short summary of what happened any time anyone sought to raise issues about the legality of "The Program":

• It's completely legal and has been judged as such (though don't ask why)
• It's "unbelievably effective." You wouldn't believe the threats we're stopping -- and that's why we can't talk about it.
• If you reveal it, hundreds of thousands of Americans may die in a future attack -- and the blood will be on your hands if you reveal and/or stop this program.

Of course, at this point, we now know that basically all three of those things are untrue. The "legality" was from a (still secret) memo from Cheney's lawyer David Addington that was kept almost totally secret. Some of the people who have seen it (including Jack Goldsmith at the OLC), apparently found that the legal reasoning was insanely weak, which may be part of the reason it was kept secret. It also notes, as has been discussed here in the past, that eventually the DOJ figured out a way to get the FISA Court's Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to issue a very questionable ruling effectively authorizing the program.

As for the "it's working," we've seen recently what a huge and incredible lie that was. Similarly, while the NSA and its defenders love to throw around the idea that if anyone reveals anything "blood will be on your hands," that threat is always issued when whistleblowing happens, and it's always a massive exaggeration.

Either way, those three big lies were effective in scaring people off from doing anything about the program -- including Bill Keller at the NY Times, who spiked James Risen's big story about the warrantless wiretapping (a part of the larger program) for over a year (well past the 2004 Presidential election). And, of course, since the program became known finally when Risen was getting ready to publish a book about it (and thus Keller felt he couldn't sit on the story any longer), those "hundreds of thousands of deaths" were (once again) proven to be nothing but bogus FUD.

Of course, in the past year, Ed Snowden has revealed many more details of The Program and what it later turned into, and thus provided even more evidence that the three claims were just ridiculous lies all along. And yet, for over a decade now, those three big lies have been at the heart of the NSA's program to spy on Americans.

Filed Under: david addington, dick cheney, fud, nsa, surveillance, united states of secrecy

Dick Cheney Lies: Claims Not A Single Case Of NSA Abusing Its Authority

from the that's,-um,-not-true dept

At the bottom of a Mother Jones article covering a "behind-closed-doors talk" by former Vice President Dick Cheney -- in which he talked up (to applause) the idea of bombing Iran and whined that President Obama was too weak in the Middle East -- the authors mention that actually much of his speech was devoted to defending the NSA. Apparently, he did this by flat out lying.

There is the belief, he said, "that we have created in the National Security Agency this monster bureaucracy that's reading everybody's mail, listening to everybody's phone calls, infringing upon our civil liberties and civil rights. Hogwash." He claimed that there has not been a single case of NSA abusing its authority.

Well, except an internal NSA audit that was reported on months ago actually found that the NSA abused its authority thousands of times per year. And, really, a big part of the complaints aren't necessarily that the NSA abused its authority, but that even if they didn't "abuse their authority" that the ability to collect all this information was legal in the first place. Meanwhile, we also know that there are also a bunch of cases where the NSA has admitted analysts willfully abused their powers. And, while the NSA claims that it's caught all of those involved, a large percentage of them involved "self-reporting," which suggests many cases of abuse slipped under the radar. And, of course, there were many other known abuses as well, including many years in which the NSA flat-out ignored the FISA court's rules on handling metadata, allowing it to be shared widely, despite rules and promises not to do so.

This also ignores the fact that both a federal judge and the federal government's privacy and civil liberties oversight board (PCLOB) found the program unconstitutional and illegal. Yes, others have found that the program is legitimate, but to ignore the still open-ended question as to the legitimacy of the program to argue that there's been "no abuse" of authority is ridiculous. Hell, even the famed rubber stamping FISA court came close to shutting down the program and elsewhere discussed how the so-called privacy protections within the program was "so frequently and systematically violated" as to mean that they have "never functioned effectively."

I don't know about how Dick Cheney defines "abuse their authority," but it seems like there's fairly strong evidence of pretty widespread abuse -- much of it taking place while Cheney was in power. Of course, since his definition of "abuse" seems to be "doing something that Dick Cheney personally doesn't like," then, I guess he'd be correct. But, given the rather clear -- and flat-out admitted -- cases of abuse, combined with significant claims that the entire program is abusive -- it would appear that Cheney is simply lying.

Filed Under: abuse, dick cheney, lies, nsa, surveillance

Dick Cheney's Crystal Ball Says That NSA Surveillance Could Have Stopped 9/11

from the but-not-the-boston-bombing dept

We already commented on FBI director Robert Mueller arguing that the NSA's mass surveillance techniques would have prevented 9/11, and now it appears that Dick Cheney is agreeing with this fictional scenario in which his crystal ball says what might have happened:

"As everybody who's been associated with the program's said, if we had had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego — two hijackers — had been able to use that program, that capability, against that target, we might well have been able to prevent 9/11," Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday."

That's speculation based on nothing, frankly. As has been widely covered, there were a number of reasons why the government failed to stop 9/11, just as there were plenty of reasons it failed to stop the Boston bombings back in April. The idea that this program would have stopped one (while it clearly missed the other) isn't particularly convincing.

Of course, none of that gets to the bigger question of whether or not it's worth it. In theory, we could stop all sorts of crimes by putting military personnel and equipment in the streets, with the power to invade any home and do a full search. But we don't allow that. Because that's a violation of our privacy. And, yes, the loss of life from a terrorist attack is tragic and horrifying -- but many more people are killed in car accidents, and we don't freak out about that and take away everyone's cars. Giving up our basic principles of freedom on the off chance it might possibly stop a terrorist attack (while still missing other terrorist attacks) doesn't really seem like living up to the basic ideals of this country.

Filed Under: 9/11, dick cheney, fud, nsa, nsa surveillance, terrorism