How's that for an ominous headline? Greg Sargent has obtained the request Cheney filed for the CIA documents he claims will prove the effectiveness of torture.
You can look at Cheney’s request form right here. They open the window a bit on the scope and direction of his request, which he has claimed will prove that Bush’s torture program yielded worthwhile intelligence.
Cheney requested two CIA reports, both of them from the "detainees" folder, which suggests that the docs detail the interrogation of suspects.
And over at TPM, David Kurtz picks up on an interesting nugget:
In particular he requests two CIA reports: a 12-page report dated July 13, 2004, and a 19-page report dated June 1, 2005.
But note especially that Cheney's request identifies a specific folder marked "Detainees" kept in "OVP Cheney Immediate Office Files." [emphasis mine]
Dick Cheney had classified CIA documents proving torture worked in his private office files. Well, isn't that convenient. I think we can be pretty sure that the documents will "prove" torture worked, but whether we can trust anything they contain is obviously in question.
Update: More from David:
Later Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Spencer Ackerman explains why those dates are significant. The point here is that by 2004-05, the Administration's self-justification for its torture policy was well underway. These reports are not contemporaneous accounts of what intelligence the torture yielded. Rather, the CIA and Cheney were papering the file well after the fact.
Now, I know some of you will say it doesn't matter whether torture worked or not. This is true, as far as it goes. But there's a large body of evidence not only that torture doesn't work generally, but that that it didn't work specifically when implemented by the U.S. (or didn't work any better than non-criminal methods would have worked). So while I've seen a lot of well-reasoned arguments about why the debate shouldn't be framed as did the torture work or not, I would say that is merely one part of a wide-ranging debate, and there's no reason to concede that point to Cheney's mendacity.