Anytime he gets the opportunity, Dick Cheney will tell you how much the American people should be grateful that he was in the Bush Administration following the events of September 11, 2001.  You see Cheney believes his approach on enhanced interrogation kept the country “safe” from another terrorist attack.  That this assertion doesn’t logically follow never prevents Cheney from repeating it anytime he has the opportunity.  It goes something like this: "We were under a great deal of stress and had to do something to protect the country.  We had to go on the "Dark Side" for some of the things we did.  But why are people complaining.  We kept the country safe, no attacks since September 11, 2001.   Oh and yes the President did know about everything and signed off on it. It sure is great to be back on the interview shows though.  And I'm not just on FOX news either!" 

The preceding quotes are slightly superfluous as I'm just summarizing in my own words what I've heard so many times from the former vice-president since leaving office.  There is more here for those who need it.  As happy as he was to be on Face the Nation, Cheney's real moment - his Limbaugh Moment that is - came when Rush Limbaugh said that he, that is Limbaugh, considered Cheney one of the best examples of what a good Republican should be.  The plot to this however has Cheney thinking we are required to remember the years he and G.W. Bush were in the Executive Branch.  If not, terrible things will happen.  Actually one would like to forget a lot of what they did. 

Reality has certain persistence qualities though and it still comes around on a regular basis.  There is now an ongoing hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee's Panel on Administrative Oversight and the Courts and the issue isn’t how “safe” we were with Bush and Cheney but perhaps how lucky we were. It seems that the FBI was involved in interrogation of so-called detainees and was obtaining good information in the process.  This is something the FBI does well.  Its agents are trained in interrogation scenarios.  Apparently what happen though is the CIA got involved and guess what, they started doing things like waterboarding and the information, aka actionable intelligence, simply stopped flowing.  

Former State Department counselor Philip D. Zelikow and retired FBI agent Ali Soufan told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about their unsuccessful attempts to block or reverse detainee interrogation techniques that included waterboarding and repeatedly slamming detainees into flexible walls.

Soufan left a secret overseas prison in 2002 after registering concerns to his superiors at the bureau about CIA contractors engaged in what he called "amateurish, Hollywood-style interrogation methods." Zelikow and his colleagues had forcefully argued that the Bush White House should halt the practices. He said he wrote a memo challenging the legality of the interrogation techniques. The most controversial of those techniques -- waterboarding -- had ended in 2003. He said administration officials tried to destroy the memo, which is still classified, in early 2006.

Also on the table was the effectiveness of the harsh interrogation tactics. Soufan, who investigated the East Africa embassy bombings, said the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were ineffective and unreliable and, "as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda."

There are specific examples of information that was obtained from the FBI before Bush, Cheney and the CIA got involved. Actionable intelligence was obtained from Abu Zubaydah before waterboarding. It led to the arrest and prosecution of Jose Padilla and the identification of the so-called 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Once waterboarding started on Zubaydah, nothing of additional significance was discovered.  These are facts and can't be disputed. Why is Cheney trying so hard to imply something else, specifically the effectiveness of torture?  I'll discuss this a bit later. 

Of more concern to former members of the Bush Justice Department are the professional standards they may have violated in memos they authored that attempted to paint the techniques utilized in the interrogations with legal stature. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is leading a hearing of the subcommittee for Administrative Oversight of the Judiciary Committee.  It has been on CSPAN and you can glean information from the videos that I have attached here.

I'm not going to repeat what anyone who is interested can find there. What the hearings are about though is the Bush Office of Legal Council; the attorneys who work in it are responsible for providing legal guidance to the President.  The torture memos came from the OLC.  And those who wrote them could face disciplinary action or something even worse.  You see, these judicial opinions were pathetically bad. 

The methods that this legal cover was prepared for were never intended to obtain intelligence: indeed their purpose was to force false confessions and were part of a DOD program known as SERE.  According to Cheney, something of value was obtained from methods intended to obtain false information.   Interesting.  Something of value was obtained? 

Could be, however was it about September 11 and another terrorist attack on the United States or were these efforts aimed at possibly revealing something else the G.W. Bush presidency so desperately sought.  As my story's title suggests, what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were so frantic to find was a justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Although it appears very unlikely they ever found the Iraq Al Qaeda Connection (as clearly none existed), they still proceeded with the invasion.  And the waterboarding continued as well.

But anyone can see where this story is going. Read Torturing Abu Zubaydah “to achieve a political objective” and you will understand my point more lucidly.  I really wouldn't be surprised if Dick Cheney's big mouth doesn't eventually end up getting him in a whole lot of trouble.