Cheney blasts Obama over CIA probe
AFP
WASHINGTON - Former US vice president Dick Cheney has questioned President Barack Obama's trustworthiness on national security after the US Justice Department announce a probe into alleged CIA prisoner abuse.
In a statement first released late Monday, Cheney took aim at the investigation and at Obama's decision to create a new team of elite interrogators to grill suspected terrorists under White House supervision.
Attorney General Holder announced Monday he had picked Assistant US Attorney John Durham, a career prosecutor, to investigate whether CIA officers and contractors violated US law when trying to break terror suspects held overseas.
The probe will cover interrogators who went beyond boundaries set under former president George W. Bush, when top administration lawyers approved harsh interrogations techniques previously outlawed as torture.
Cheney, who has fiercely defended Bush-era tactics in the war on terrorism, said the interrogation program was "directly responsible" for preventing another large-scale Al-Qaeda attack on the United States.
"The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions," said the former vice president.
After Holder's announcement, the CIA released previously secret documents from 2004 and 2005 that described information acquired thanks to its interrogation program -- albeit with large sections blacked out.
"The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about Al-Qaeda," said Cheney.
"This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks," he said.
But critics of the CIA approach -- notably a former senior FBI official -- have said that detainees gave up valuable information under traditional questioning, and provided no better information when subsequently subjected to tactics widely denounced as torture, which violates US law.
The documents cited by Cheney did not describe precise techniques nor whether individual tactics -- like the controlled drowning known as "waterboarding" -- were effective.
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