Mitchell puts words in Cheney's mouth, overstates his remarks on CIA interrogation memos

Mitchell suggests Cheney said memo was "proof" EITs "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks"

From the August 25 broadcast of NBC's Nightly News:

MITCHELL: Did those controversial CIA tactics actually prevent attacks on the homeland? That is the core of an explosive debate tonight between former Vice President Dick Cheney and the Obama White House.

[...]

MITCHELL: So who is right? The new documents reveal that 30 of the detainees, a third of those held in the CIA's secret prisons, were subjected to the questionable practices. Cheney says the tactics "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks." His proof: in part, this memo describing how 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, admitted to a series of plots.

But Cheney did not go that far in his statement

Cheney's actual statement: Detainees subjected to EITs provided intelligence that "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks." "The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002." [Cheney statement to The Weekly Standard, 8/24/09]

Washington Post Co.'s Sargent: "Cheney is not claiming a causal relationship between torture and the intelligence gleaned from interrogations."

Cheney is not claiming a causal relationship between torture and the intelligence gleaned from interrogations. Rather, he's saying that the same individuals who were tortured also happened to yield the most important evidence about Al Qaeda. He's not saying that the docs proved torture was responsible for producing that info.

There's a reason Cheney worded his statement this carefully: The documents don't prove torture worked, as he claimed. Don't believe me? Go to paragraph 11 of this New York Times article, which says the same. [Greg Sargent, The Plum Line; 8/25/09]

Time's Scherer: Cheney "does not mention the claim" use of EITs "produced information that saved lives."

First, Cheney does not mention the claim, which he has made elsewhere, that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques produced information that saved lives. Rather, he claims only that "individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda." This statement is neither in dispute, nor much of a revelation. The enhanced techniques, when they were used as designed and not by rogue agents without proper supervision, were employed on a select few detainees who knew a lot about al Qaeda. The outstanding question is whether the enhanced techniques were necessary to produce the information, and on that score the memos continue to paint a muddy picture, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh explains today in this piece. [Michael Scherer, Time's Swampland blog, 8/25/09]

Cheney previously cited successes of EIT program, suggested memos would prove it

Cheney in May speech: Enhanced interrogation program "successful." In a May 21 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney said the "enhanced" interrogations "were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

From Cheney's speech:

In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

Our successors in office have their own views on all of these matters.

By presidential decision, last month we saw the selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations. This is held up as a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public's right to know. We're informed, as well, that there was much agonizing over this decision.

Yet somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.

Cheney previously said Obama administration "put out the legal memos" on EITs, but not "the memos that showed the success of the effort," called for release of those memos.

CHENEY: We -- with the intelligence programs, the Terror Surveillance Program, as well as the interrogation program, we set out to collect that kind of intelligence. It worked. It's been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States.

One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.

I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up until now, I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.

And I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions. [Fox News' Hannity, 4/20/09, accessed from the Nexis database]

Memos do not assess effectiveness of specific interrogation techniques

NYT: Released memos are the ones sought by Cheney, do not asses effectiveness of specific techniques. As The New York Times noted in an August 25 article, the memos released by the CIA, including the one Mitchell claimed Cheney cited as "proof" of the effectiveness of EITs, "do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness." The Times also reported that the memos are the ones Cheney "had sought to have released earlier this year."

Mitchell attributes to Obama admin. the belief that effectiveness of techniques can't be measured -- but Bush-era IG report says the same thing

From the August 25 Nightly News broadcast:

MITCHELL: [Cheney's] proof: in part, this memo describing how 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, admitted to a series of plots, one in late in 2001 to "crash a hijacked airliner into the tallest building on the U.S. West Coast." Another in early 2002 to send Al Qaeda operative and U.S. citizen José Padilla "to set off bombs in high-rise apartment buildings in an unspecified major U.S. city." And a never-before-disclosed plan in 2003 "to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York."

But administration officials say there is no way to know whether the same information could have been obtained from him without waterboarding or whether he would have given it up sooner had he been handled differently.

CIA IG report: "[E]ffectiveness" of specific techniques "cannot be so easily measured." A May 2004 report from the CIA's Office of the Inspector General released August 24 concluded:

The Agency's detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world. The CTC Detention and Interrogation Program has resulted in the issuance of thousands of individual intelligence reports and analytic products supporting the counterterrorism efforts of U.S. policymakers and military commanders. The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured, however.

CIA IG report "identified concerns" about whether "risks" of waterboarding were "justified by the results." From the report:

Inasmuch as EITs have been used only since August 2002, and they have not all been used with every high value detainee, there is limited data on which to asses their individual effectiveness. This Review identified concerns about the use of the waterboard, specifically whether the risks of its use were justified by the results, whether it has been unnecessarily used in some instances, and whether the fact that it is being applied in a manner different from its use in SERE training brings into question the continued applicability of the DoJ opinion to its use. Although the waterboard is the most intrusive of the EITs, the fact that precautions have been taken to provide on-site medical oversight in the use of all EITs is evidence that their use poses risks.

Transcript

From the August 25 broadcast of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams:

MITCHELL: Did those controversial CIA tactics actually prevent attacks on the homeland? That is the core of an explosive debate tonight between former Vice President Dick Cheney and the Obama White House.

[begin video clip]

MITCHELL: Escalating the feud from a family vacation in Alaska, Dick Cheney challenged President Obama's ability to protect the homeland. Cheney said the decision to prosecute interrogators was "political" and shows, quote, "why so many Americans have doubts about this administration's ability to be responsible for our nation's security" -- fighting words.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT (Clinton administration secretary of state): And I think in many ways his statements in these days are kind of pathetic. I think he should know that the Obama administration is doing everything to keep America secure.

MITCHELL: So who is right? The new documents reveal that 30 of the detainees, a third of those held in the CIA's secret prisons, were subjected to the questionable practices. Cheney says the tactics "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks." His proof: in part, this memo describing how 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, admitted to a series of plots, one in late in 2001 to "crash a hijacked airliner into the tallest building on the U.S. West Coast." Another in early 2002 to send Al Qaeda operative and U.S. citizen José Padilla "to set off bombs in high-rise apartment buildings in an unspecified major U.S. city." And a never-before-disclosed plan in 2003 "to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York."

But administration officials say there is no way to know whether the same information could have been obtained from him without waterboarding or whether he would have given it up sooner had he been handled differently. In fact, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told the International Red Cross in 2006 he lied to fool his questioners.

TOM PARKER (Amnesty International): He'd made stuff up deliberately to mislead his interrogators and make them stop, and he took pleasure in the fact that the United States have probably wasted money responding to these fabrications.

MITCHELL: An argument, experts say, that may never be resolved.