June 11, 2009 archive

Via emptywheel

Sheldon Whitehouse gave a barnburner of a speech last night, in which he described how egregious Dick Cheney’s lies about torture have been.

The speech goes further than President Obama’s and Russ Feingold’s and Carl Levin’s calls on Cheney’s lies in two ways. First, those other calls focused on whether the documents Cheney wants declassified actually say what he claims they say; Whitehouse focused on whether Cheney’s more basic claims about torture are true. And second, Whitehouse here focuses not on whether we needed waterboarding to get intelligence (Obama, for example, said, “the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques — which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques — doesn’t answer the core question, which is:  Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?), but whether we actually got any useful intelligence from the methods at all.