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When will reporters stop taking Cheney claims at face value?

April 21, 2009 2:37 pm ET by Jamison Foser

Greg Sargent is trying to pin down former Vice President Cheney's staff on the details of his claim to have "formally" asked the CIA to release intelligence that he claims proves the efficacy of torture. Several news organizations are uncritically repeating Cheney's claim, but Sargent has a source who says the CIA never received such a request, and a Cheney spokesperson is refusing to explain how the request was made.

Meanwhile, I haven't seen any reporter ask Cheney or his staff what seems like an obvious question: If there exist documents that prove that torture prevented attacks on the US, and those documents can be released without jeopardizing national security, why didn't the Bush administration release them before leaving office?

It isn't like it's a surprise that the Obama administration has made some changes in Bush administration torture policy; Cheney and Bush had to know that was a possibility. So why didn't they release this evidence that supposedly proves that torture is a necessary national security tool? (If the answer is that they feared releasing the documents would jeopardize national security, there's an obvious follow-up: Why does Cheney want them released now?)

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    • Author by mk3872 (April 21, 2009 2:43 pm ET)
         
      Because the press is AFRAID of Cheney. Duh.
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      • Author by carlileb5935 (April 22, 2009 4:42 pm ET)
           

        What are they going to do when it looks like Cheney ordered torture of these guys in order to come up with excuses to invade iraq?

        That's 1-million times worse than what we've been hearing so far. 

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    • Author by MickD (April 21, 2009 3:26 pm ET)
         
      Cheney's staff must have their blood freeze when they are asked a direct question such as Greg Sargent asserted. They are so use to DC never getting a follow-up.
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    • Author by mikelartist (April 21, 2009 4:38 pm ET)
         
      Of course there was no "formal request" because there are no reports or memos that Cheney mentioned. This is just another Cranky McPenquin lie.
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    • Author by Texas Aggie (April 22, 2009 12:53 pm ET)
         
      Even if they feared that revealing the documents then would have endangered national security but not now, they never let endangerment of national security stop them from declassifying information for political reasons before. For instance, Valerie Plame was outed shutting down the CIA program to monitor WMD. They outed the al Qaeda computer expert who had flipped to the CIA for bragging rights thereby destroying an important link to al Qaeda. They outed the British investigation of some potential terrorists for political bragging reasons thereby allowing the culprits to escape. They did the same thing with a German investigation for the same reasons.
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    • Author by carlileb5935 (April 22, 2009 4:39 pm ET)
         

      It's even worse than this-- the evidence is mounting that most of this torture was done to come up with Iraqi links to Al Queda-- that never existed. Cheney ordered torture in order to come up with evidence to justify a move he had already decided to make years before: invade Iraq.

      But the MSM is suggesting right now that Cheney was somehow merely trying to see if the stories he had heard about the linkage were true. Ha!  

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