A couple of weeks ago I put together a torture timeline, an attempt to put the sudden flood of information about our (not-so) secret torture program into some perspective.
As it becomes more and more apparent that the prime mover of this program was none other than Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of American politics, I thought that it might be useful to have a separate timeline which focuses on the Sith master and his actions.
Submitted for your approval....
11 Sep 2001 Al-Qaeda operatives hijack four planes; they fly of them into the World Trade Center, destroying both towers and killing around 3,000 people. The third plane is flown into the Pentagon, damaging the building and killing over a hundred people. The fourth plane is headed for Washington DC, possibly targeting the Capitol.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who is now in the Situation Room, authorizes the Air Force to shoot down the plane, but before they can do so, passengers on the plane overpower the hijackers and force them to crash-land in western Pennsylvania. Cheney later insists that he and President Bush had a phone discussion about this action immediately prior to this authorization, but there is no record of the call. There is a record of a call to Air Force One shortly afterwards, however.
16 Sep 2001 Cheney goes on Meet the Press, where Tim Russert asks him about intelligence gathering in the wake of the Sep. 11th attacks:
MR. RUSSERT: When Osama bin Laden took responsibility for blowing up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. embassies, several hundred died, the United States launched 60 tomahawk missiles into his training sites in Afghanistan. It only emboldened him. It only inspired him and seemed even to increase his recruitment. Is it safe to say that that kind of response is not something we’re considering, in that kind of minute magnitude?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I — clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the — one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s — if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission. [Empahases added]
18 Oct 2001 An alarm goes off in the White House indicating that everyone who had been in the Situation Room that day, including Cheney, may have been exposed to a lethal chemical, radiological or biological agent. It is later discovered to have been a false alarm.
23 Oct 2001 John Yoo and Robert Delahunty of the Office of Legal Counsel write a memo arguing that the President's authority as commander-in-chief supersedes the Fourth Amendment and other protections, allowing him to arrest and interrogate potential terrorists without a warrant. In an interview on 15 Mar 2009 (see below), Cheney will argue that warrantless surveillance and arrest were essential for the protection of the country.
29 Oct 2001 Threats of "mortal attack" have become
so frequent, and so terrifying, that on October 29 Cheney quietly insisted upon absenting himself from the White House to what was described as "a secure, undisclosed location"
15 Nov 2001 Bush orders the creation of military tribunals for any detainees captured in the War on Terror. Cheney justifies the order:
The foreign terrorists who could be subjected to such tribunals "don't deserve to be treated as prisoners of war," Vice President Cheney said. "They don't deserve the same guarantees and safeguards we use for an American citizen."
April or May 2002 DCI George Tenet and other CIA officials brief Cheney on measures the CIA plans to use to extract information from captured Al-Qaeda personnel, including Abu Zubaydeh. Sometime in mid-May, the CIA specifically proposesto use waterboarding. It is not clear if Cheney was at that meeting, although Rice, Ashcroft and Gonzalez were.
17 Jul 2002 NSA Rice advises DCI George Tenet that the CIA could "proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydeh ... subject to a determination of legality by OLC." Cheney is reportedly present at that meeting. (Note: the report of Cheney's presence is not sourced.)
26 Jul 2002 The Office of Legal Counsel orally advises the CIA that waterboarding is legal. (Two days earlier, it had orally advised the CIA that other, unspecified, techniques were also legal.)
1 Aug 2002 Jay Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, issues a memo written by John Yoo authorizing waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques for which the CIA had earlier been given oral approval.
August 2002 - March 2003 Under pressure from Cheney (and Rumsfeld) to find a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the CIA repeatedly waterboards Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydeh, but never develops any intelligence showing a link. (Note: The Red Cross report suggests - the timeline is unclear - that the CIA subjected Abu Zubaydeh to harsh interrogation techniques starting in May 2002, though the "real torture" started in July or August.)
Note: At the present time, the evidence for this relationship between the CIA's actions and Cheney's desires is still circumstantial. However, the Senate Armed Service Committee report on detainee treatment includes this quote from Maj. Charles Burney (a former US Army psychiatrist) on page 72:
[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part ofthe time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link .. , there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results. [Ellipses in original]
? Jul 2003 Cheney attends a meeting with the Attorney General, top CIA officials and NSC staff at which they reaffirm that the CIA's techniques, including waterboarding, are "lawful and reflect[] administration policy."
7 May 2004 The CIA inspector-general issues a report on the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" after reviewing reviewing videotapes and documents, and conducting over 100 interviews.
[T]he inspector general's report concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information. Officials familiar with its contents said it also concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks," according to the Justice Department's declassified summary of it. WaPo 10 May 2009 [Emphases added]
The report itself is still classified, but Obama administration officials have said the decision has been made to declassify it.
22 Jun 2004 During the Senate's annual photo op, Sen. Leahy notices Cheney is talking only to Republicans. Leahy, long a critic of the no-bid Halliburton contacts, invites Cheney to come talk to Democratic senators as well. An exchange over Leahy's criticisms ensues, ending with Cheney telling Leahy, on the floor of the United States Senate, to "go fuck yourself." [This has nothing to do with torture per se; it is just more evidence of Cheney's general state of mind and sense of self.]
17 Jun 2004 After withdrawing the Yoo/Bybee memos, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith resigns under pressure from David Addington, Cheney's legal adviser. His replacement, Steven Bradbury, will issue new memos (PDF, PDF and PDF) providing legal cover for torture in May 2005.
? Jun 2005 Philip Zelikow, counsel to now-Secretary of State Rice, writes a memo challenging the legal rationale for the enhanced interrogation techniques. The White House orders the memo suppressed, and Zelikow suspects that Cheney was responsible for that order.
5 Oct 2005 By a vote of 90-9, the Senate passes Sen. John McCain's and Lindsley Graham's amendment to a military spending bill, which restricts the interrogation techniques that may be used on detainees. Cheney attempts to derail the amendment, threatening a presidential veto. On Dec. 15th, Bush reportedly accepts McCain's argument over Cheney's, but when he signs the bill on Jan 3, 2006, Bush adds a signing statement that says he will waive the restrictions if he sees fit.
24 Oct 2006 Cheney gives an interview with a conservative talk radio host in which he describes waterboarding as a "no-brainerc for me," though he denies that it is torture. The Bush White House, put on the defensive, insists that Cheney was not talking about waterboarding, but offers no alternative interpretation.
11 Apr 2008 For the first time a news story "directly implicate" the White House, and specifically Cheney, in the decision to use waterboarding. The White House refuses to comment.
15 Dec 2008 Cheney gives an interview with ABC News in which he insists that:
On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.
But, probably for the first time, he admits that detainees were waterboarded:
KARL: And on KSM, one of those tactics, of course, widely reported was waterboarding. And that seems to be a tactic we no longer use. Even that you think was appropriate?
CHENEY: I do. ABC News transcript
18 Dec 2008 In an interview with the Washington Times as he prepares to leave office, Cheney defends the use of waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others, saying that "I think it would have been unethical or immoral..." not to use all available techniques to extract information from them, and adding:
"Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture," the vice president said. "We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice, legal opinion out of the [Justice Department's] office of legal counsel."
22 Dec 2008 Cheney gives an interview in which he says that "I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation," though he says only 3 were waterboarded.
4 Feb 2009 In an interview with Politico, Cheney insists that waterboarding and other policies he promoted have protected the US from further attacks, and warns that Obama's refusal to use those same techniques is leaving the country vulnerable to "a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind...."
15 Mar 2009 In a CNN interview with John King, Cheney insists that waterboarding kept America safe, and that Obama is making us less safe by refusing to use that and other techniques. (Note: From the ThinkProgress summary, one might get the impression that King initiated the idea that Obama is making the country vulnerable, but in listening to the interview, it's more likely he's following up on something Cheney said first, not making the suggestion himself.)
20 Apr 2009 Cheney calls for the release of memos which, he says, will prove that waterboarding and similar techniques saved American lives and were a "success."
10 May 2009 On CBS' Face the Nation, Cheney again denies that torture was used:
The reason we went to the Justice Department wasn’t because we felt we were going to take some kind of free hand assault on these people or that we were in the torture business. We weren’t. And specifically, what we got from the Office of Legal Counsel were legal memos that laid out what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate, in light of our international commitments. If we had been about torture, we wouldn’t have wasted our time going to the Justice Department. ...
I think the charge that somehow there was something wrong done here or that this was torture in violation of U.S. statutes is just absolutely false.
And for perhaps the first time, he tied the former president to the practices. When Shieffer asked him if Bush knew everything that he, Cheney, knew, the former VP replied:
I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.
Jane Meyer, in her book The Dark Side, sums up Cheney's contribution this way (excerpted here - and remember that her book was published in 2008, when we had a lot less proof of torture and Cheney's role in it):
From the start of the administration, Cheney had confidently assumed the national security portfolio for a president with virtually no experience in the area. But Al Qaeda’s attacks exposed a gaping shortcoming in the Vice President’s thinking. The Soviet Union, whose threat had preoccupied Cheney and other doomsday planners in the 1980s, was gone. In its place another, more intangible danger had arisen. No one in the Bush Administration, including Cheney, had had the foresight or imagination to see Bin Laden’s plot unfolding. ...
When Al Qaeda struck, Cheney and the other hardliners who had spent decades militating for a more martial and aggressive foreign policy were caught off guard. Frozen in a Cold War—era mind-set, they overlooked threats posed not by great armed nation-states, but by small, lithe rogue groups waging "asymmetric" warfare. ...
The lesson for Bush and Cheney was that terrorists had struck at the United States because they saw the country as soft. Bush worried that the nation was too "materialistic, hedonistic," and that Bin Laden "didn’t feel threatened" by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their own intelligence failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the Republican Party since the Watergate era. There was too much international law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the President’s war powers, too many rights for defendants, and too many rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness and too much meddling by Congress and the press. ... Now Cheney saw the terrorist threat in such catastrophic terms that his end, saving America from possible extinction, justified virtually any means. [Emphasis added]
Too much law, indeed.
Finally, this observation from Andy Worthington in his review of The Rise and Rise of Dick Cheney:
When no evidence whatsoever emerged to support any of Cheney’s claims [of a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda] –- even after his regular and unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he was known to demand, "Why doesn’t your intelligence support what we know is out there?" –- he turned to an "independent intelligence unit" that Rumsfeld had conveniently established in the Pentagon, where the spurious case for war was safe from dissenting voices. ...
[Former Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill found a White House in which Cheney –- the leader –- had embraced "brazen ideology" that was "not penetrable by facts", while Bush –- sidelined and stupefied –- was "like a blind man in a room of deaf people".
That is Dick Cheney even today, "not penetrable by facts" - including the fact that all his tortures not only produced nothing useful, but made us more unsafe. And when the memos that he has said will prove his case are released and found to do the opposite, my bet is that he will, once again, respond: "So?"