In My Time - Dick Cheney [276]
I wanted another look at the documents, so on March 31, 2009, I took a trip to the National Archives in downtown D.C. and reviewed them in a secure reading room. The reports were just as I recalled, and I filled out a form making an official request that they be declassified. Before I had a response to my request, the president decided to declassify a different set of documents. These were the memos produced by the Bush administration Justice Department that explained the legal rationale supporting enhanced interrogation and also detailed the particular methods involved. At about the same time, President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, signaled the possibility that the lawyers who prepared these memos and the intelligence officers who conducted enhanced interrogations might face professional sanction or even criminal prosecution.
I was appalled that the new administration would even consider punishing honorable public servants who had carried out the Bush administration’s lawful policies and kept the country safe. I was also deeply concerned about the selective fashion in which sensitive information was being declassified and made public. The administration had just revealed to the world, including our enemies, methods used to question detainees thought to have information about future attacks. Yet the information in the memos I had requested—detailing all we had learned, and the attacks we had stopped through the enhanced interrogation program—was being kept secret. A few weeks after President Obama released the legal memos, I heard from CIA Director Leon Panetta, a colleague and friend from my days in the House. He wrote to tell me that my request was being denied.
I had scheduled a speech on these matters for Thursday, May 21, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank with which I have been long affiliated. On Monday of that week, the White House announced that President Obama would also be giving a speech that day at about the same time. I think his speech was meant to preempt mine, but I was happy to slide the time for mine back so that he could speak first. The result was what the media called “dueling speeches.”
In his speech, President Obama reaffirmed his pledge to follow the “imperative” of closing Guantanamo within a year, adding that the facility had “likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” Indeed, he said, “By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.” On the matter of enhanced interrogation, he said, “I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation,” and called the techniques we had authorized “torture.” Such methods, the president explained, had all arisen from the “expedience” of the previous administration, at an unacceptable cost to conscience and to the fundamental values of our country: “They are not who we are, and they are not America.”
When my turn came, I recalled the days after 9/11 and the absolute determination of the Bush administration to make sure our nation never again faced such a day of horror. The key to ensuring that was intelligence, and we gave our intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain information, some of it known only to the worst of the terrorists, through tough interrogation, if need be. The interrogations had the sole purpose of gaining specific information that would save American lives and did in fact yield such information. I called again for the release of the memos that would prove just that.
To describe what we had done as a program of torture, I said, “is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent