WASHINGTON: Aiming to forge a new beginning with the Muslim world and change the course set by the former Bush administration, President Barack Obama acknowledged in Cairo this week that the US response to the 9/11 attacks was enormous and led to “grave violations” by some Americans.
Back home, the American press revealed this week that one of those people in question regarding these “grave violations” was former Vice President Dick Cheney who they allege personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior lawmakers on the Bush administration’s torture program in 2005.
Reports also say that the CIA has previously failed to disclose Cheney’s role in the meetings, saying information on who oversaw them was unavailable.
The Cheney briefings appear to have come as part of the Bush administration’s aggressive effort to convince Congress members to back the torture techniques used on foreign prisoners.
In an interview this week, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, “Cheney’s office was ground zero. It was his office you dealt with at the end of the day.”
Graham is not alone, US Sen. Carl Levin, has accused Cheney of lying about CIA memos detailing the use of interrogation techniques.
Levin said an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which he is the chairman, allegedly found Cheney was not truthful when he said the classified documents detailed the effectiveness of the enhanced techniques.
Levin said at a Foreign Policy Association dinner in Washington the two CIA documents mentioned by Cheney do not connect collected intelligence to the use of techniques such as waterboarding.
“I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction,” Levin said on Wednesday.
Cheney, who served as vice president under President Bush, has said he wants the classified memos released to show the usefulness of the now-banned techniques.
Interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation were banned and deemed acts of torture in an executive order from incoming President Obama.
Dismissing such allegations, a former top American interrogator is responding forcefully to the case Cheney has made in favor of torture, or what the former vice president refers to as “enhanced interrogation methods.”
Matthew Alexander, who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, is a 14-year military interrogator who oversaw more than a thousand interrogations and conducted more than 300 in Iraq himself.
He led the interrogation team that scored one of the United States’ most high-profile captures, that of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and he did it using traditional methods.
Alexander disagrees with Cheney’s arguments. The most immediate blow Alexander strikes is regarding his own success at is former job, which undercuts Cheney’s case for more brutal techniques.
“At the prison where I conducted interrogations,” responded Alexander, “we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”
In spite of all this, Cheney is back on center stage. Though he left the White House wheelchair-bound in January, looking like all he wanted to do was to see out his days fishing and shooting in Wyoming, his retirement didn’t last long.
Unwilling to settle into the traditional role of elder statesman, 68-year-old Cheney has emerged as a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. This most secretive of Vice-Presidents has transformed himself into one of Obama’s most outspoken critics, defending the Bush administration’s policy on ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, which included waterboarding, even as the new President outlaws them. Such decisions, Cheney says, may raise the terrorist threat to Americans.
