In an April 22 article, The Washington Post asserted that "[c]ritics on the right, including former vice president Richard B. Cheney, said that [President] Obama was jeopardizing national security by releasing" portions of four previously classified Justice Department memos that authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the CIA. Similarly, the Associated Press reported that Obama was “assailed by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans for, in their view, undermining national security and tipping off the enemy,” and The New York Times reported that “Bush administration veterans, starting with former Vice President Dick Cheney, have argued that the harsh methods helped prevent terrorist attacks.” The Times added: “In an interview Monday on Fox News, Mr. Cheney called for the Obama White House to release additional memos that he said showed that the techniques were useful.” However, in allowing Cheney to criticize Obama for releasing the memos, none of these media outlets noted Cheney's self-acknowledged role in authorizing the techniques -- a role previously explored at length in a June 2007 Post investigation.

This is the second day in a row that the Times has reported on Cheney's attacks without noting his role in authorizing the techniques.

As Media Matters for America has noted, during a December 15, 2008, interview with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, Cheney said, “We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.” Cheney also said he was “aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared” for tactics used against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and said he agreed that waterboarding was “appropriate.”

According to the June 25, 2007, Post article by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, “Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden 'torture' and permitted use of 'cruel, inhuman or degrading' methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from [Justice Department lawyer John C.] Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.” The article continued:

David S. Addington, Cheney's general counsel, set the new legal agenda in a blunt memorandum shortly after the CIA delegation returned to Langley. Geneva's “strict limits on questioning of enemy prisoners,” he wrote on Jan. 25, 2002, hobbled efforts “to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists.”

No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives “difficult to predict,” might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of “violence,” “cruel treatment” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” against a detainee “at any time and in any place whatsoever.” The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential directive for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated “humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of” the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

[...]

The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture “prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and therefore permits many others. Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of “torture” to mean only suffering “equivalent in intensity” to the pain of “organ failure ..... or even death.”

When news accounts unearthed that opinion nearly two years later, the White House repudiated its contents. Some officials described it as hypothetical, without disclosing that the opinion was written in response to specific questions from the CIA. Administration officials attributed authorship to Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who had come to serve in the Office of Legal Counsel.

But the “torture memo,” as it became widely known, was not Yoo's work alone. In an interview, Yoo said that Addington, as well as [then-Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and deputy White House counsel Timothy E. Flanigan, contributed to the analysis.

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line into torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to “commit torture,” that passage stated, “do not apply” to the commander in chief, because Congress “may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government has prosecuted as a war crime since at least 1901. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

Yoo said for the first time in an interview that he verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be a risky policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits. “I always thought that only the CIA should do this, but people at the White House and at DOD felt differently,” Yoo said. The migration of those techniques from the CIA to the military, and from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib, aroused worldwide condemnation when abuse by U.S. troops was exposed.

Additionally, in a December 16, 2008, Post article, reporter Peter Finn noted Cheney's comments in the ABC interview, writing that during the interview, “Cheney also for the first time acknowledged playing a central role in approving the CIA's use of controversial interrogation tactics, including 'waterboarding,' which simulates drowning.”