The new, old face of the Republican party, former Veep Dick "Dick" Cheney, is suddenly all for transparency.
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 show 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 ask that they be declassified now. I did -- haven't announced this up 'til now, I haven't talked about. But I know specifically of reports that I read that I saw that lay out what we've learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country. And I now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people can 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."
All this plaintive whining from the guy who claimed that he had the fourth branch power to unilaterally declassify information. And there he was, sitting on all that proof of the effectiveness of their program all that time! What a humble guy!
He's also directly at odds with all his former neo-con pals, like Michael Hayden who has gone to great lengths to tell the world that any release of this information will surely result in all of us being murdered in our beds. I guess they're not sharing talking points any more.
There's also a bit of veracity problem (surprise, surprise) for Cheney here.
This is getting downright Kafkaesque: I just reached a spokesperson for former Veep Dick Cheney, and she categorically refused to explain what Cheney meant when he claimed on Fox News last night that he had "formally asked" the CIA to release intelligence allegedly proving that torture works.
As I noted below, Cheney claimed he’d asked the CIA to release intel reports he’d read detailing info successfully collected via torture. But an intelligence source familiar with the situation told me that the CIA has received no such request from Cheney....
Ah, well. Amazingly, Cheney’s claim is being treated with no skepticism whatsoever. Today’s Times, for instance, noted uncritically that Cheney went on Fox to "announce" that he’d asked the CIA to declassify these reports. MSNBC just wrapped up a segment on Cheney’s demand, too.
Greg concludes that perhaps Cheney really doesn't want the alleged info released after all, but I hope that's not true. All possible information about the torture program should be declassified, and I'm assuming with that release, we can have Dick Cheney's full cooperation. He should be available to come to any hearing room to talk about this "successful" program and his role in it. Let's encourage his new-found commitment to transparency.
Update: Turns out Cheney asked the National Archives to release the documents, not the CIA. Or, actually, he asked the Archives to release some documents--presumably the ones he spoke about in this clip. They are classified, and the Archive has asked the "relevant agency," presumably the CIA, for a determination on them.