You Can't See It, But Cheney's Pants Are on Fire

In his full-on assault on the president's conterterrorism policies yesterday, Dick Cheney deployed an arsenal of “omissions, exaggerations and misstatements,” charge Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of McClatchy. Among them:

• Cheney claimed that harsh interrogations yielded vital, attack-preventing information and quoted Adm. Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence. In fact Blair, along with the CIA and FBI brass, said the damage outweighed the benefit, and they the tactics "are not essential to our national security."

• Only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained overseas, said Cheney. Actually, most captives were low-level soldiers or entirely innocent civilians.
• The ex-veep blamed the Abu Ghraib scandal on a few bad apples, but a bipartisan Senate report says senior officials purposefully redefined the law to authorize the abuse.
• Sound intelligence is crucial to counterterrorism, argued Cheney, who himself regularly ignored many intelligence sources and relied on others that were viewed as untrustworthy. 

To read the full list, click the link below.
(More Dick Cheney stories.)