TPMMuckraker
Dick Cheney: June 2009

Torture Advocates Mum On Whether They Support Waterboarding Roeder

Zachary Roth | June 8, 2009, 2:18PM

For years now, torture supporters have been using the "ticking time-bomb" scenario to argue that it's irresponsible to issue a blanket ban on torture. If we knew that a bomb was set to explode imminently, goes the argument, and that torture could help obtain information to avert the disaster and save hundreds of lives, who wouldn't do it?

This has always borne more relation to an episode of 24 than to the actual war on terror. Even torture supporters have admitted that no such ticking time-bomb case has ever occurred. But it looks like we may now be confronted with a version of it in a very different context -- and this time, it's hard not to notice that those same torture supporters don't seem to be rushing to call for the waterboard just yet.

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Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, John Cornyn, Right-wing extremism, Scott Roeder, Torture

Alberto Gonzales

DOJ Torture Emails: How The Times Could Have Reported The Story

Zachary Roth | June 8, 2009, 1:01PM

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Justice Department lawyers agreed in 2005 that harsh interrogation techniques were legal. The impact of the story -- which was based largely on email messages written at the time by James Comey, then a high-ranking Justice Department official -- has been, it seems, to bolster the Dick Cheney position in the ongoing torture debate in Washington.

But the Times also, to its credit, released Comey's emails in full, allowing us all to make our own judgments about what they show. And after a close look at the emails, it seems clear that the paper could have used them to write a very different story -- with a very different effect on the public debate.

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Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Harriet Miers, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

Dick Cheney

Cheney's Campaign To Keep Lawmakers In Line On Torture

Zachary Roth | June 3, 2009, 12:11PM

The Washington Post reports today that, during 2005, Dick Cheney sat in on several of those CIA torture briefings, in an effort to persuade wavering lawmakers to keep backing the torture program.

The news doesn't really come as a shock -- indeed, some close observers had already guessed that the then-veep was involved in the briefings. But it does add to the picture of Cheney embarking during the middle years of the Bush administration on a focused, stealthy campaign to make sure the US didn't give up what he saw as its right to torture.