Remember how Cheney made a big fuss about releasing classified memos he said would prove that torture worked and even saved lives. Well those memos were released Monday. And guess what. He was full of s#$%. TPM Muckraker:
Well, yesterday, those memos were released, along with the CIA inspector general's report. And, surprise surprise, they don't begin to show what Cheney said they did.
The memos, from 2004 and 2005, do say that some detainees, particularly Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, gave up useful information during debriefing sessions. But nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture.
Indeed, as Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent shows, most of the evidence suggests they came through traditional interrogation techniques. As Spencer puts it: "Cheney's public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don't."
So Cheney was lying again. Big surprise. But why would Cheney lie. He knows he can get away with it every time.
It is not to say that no one in the establishment media has covered this. But a Lexis-Nexis search (sorry, behind firewall) shows that, as is always the case, the lie got repeated on every channel, in every mass media outlet repeatedly while the correction to the lie got relatively no airplay at all.
This has been the history of Bush administration lies. Come out and just lie through your teeth to the public, and then 3 weeks later, release the real information all the while knowing that the real information won't get covered at all. A classic example was a big announcement by Colin Powell that terrorism had been reduced dramatically. It was smeared all over the airwaves, even appearing on local news outlets across the country.
A few weeks later, however, it came out that that announcement was complete BS. It turned out in fact that terrorism had not only NOT been reduced, but had increased. Was there a scandal? A big hoopla over the release of misinformation? Even just basic reporting that terrorism had gone up and the US was still facing a threat? No. Coverage of the corrected stats was almost non-existent and when it was covered, the Washington press was almost apologetic to the great Colin Powell for having to correct his big press release. They blindly accepted his explanation that it was just an honest mistake.
Here we go again. It was a disgrace that so many press outlets gave Cheney, a proven serial liar, some benefit of the doubt over these memos. But now that they've been released, and clearly show that, once again, he was lying, it's a non-story?
Nothing has changed. This is exactly the same press corp that got George Bush elected, sold lies to get the country into war, and is now allowing utter nonsense to be peddled as truth about the health care plans in Congress.
Jefferson said that in order for democracy to work, a well informed citizenry was required. I'm pretty sure he would have viewed a lying, misinforming press as an enemy to democracy.