Cheney: We waterboarded U.S. soldiers, so it’s not torture

Former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Friday morning that the waterboarding of terror suspects did not amount to torture because the same techniques had been used on U.S. soldiers during training.

“The notion that somehow the United States was torturing anybody is not true,” Cheney told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute at an event to promote his new book. “Three people were waterboarded and the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and it produced phenomenal results for us.”

“Another key point that needs to be made was that the techniques that we used were all previously used on Americans,” Cheney went on. “All of them were used in training for a lot of our own specialists in the military. So there wasn’t any technique that we used on any al Qaeda individual that hadn’t been used on our own troops first, just to give you some idea whether or not we were ‘torturing’ the people we captured.”

Of course, there are some differences between the waterboarding of troops as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training and the waterboarding of suspected al Qaeda prisoners. For example, the troops in training are not subjected to the practice 183 times, as KSM was. Also, the soldiers presumably know their training will end, and they won’t be allowed to actually drown or left to rot in some dark, anonymous prison.

Some in Cheney’s party, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), believe that waterboarding is torture. Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism consultant for the U.S. government and a former SERE instructor, has argued repeatedly that waterboarding is torture and called for prohibiting its use on prisoners.

“Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration — usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten[ed] with its use again and again,” he said.

Cheney said the George W. Bush administration had received approval for the “enhanced interrogation program” from all nine congressional leaders who had been briefed on its details: this included the leaders of both intelligence committees, the leaders of both parties, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

When asked if they thought the program should be continued, they all said, “Absolutely,” Cheney said. And when asked if the Bush administration should seek additional congressional approval for the program, the nine Congressional leaders unanimously told him, “Absolutely not,” according to Cheney’s account.

Cheney also said the Bush administration’s interrogation policies were partially responsible for recent successes in the fight against al Qaeda, includig the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“I’d make the case we’ve been successful in part because of the intelligence we have, because of what we’ve learned from men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, back when he was subjected [to enhanced interrogation],” he said.

In the one-hour discussion at AEI with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Cheney also talked about huddling with his wife and daughter at Camp David on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001. Camp David was the “secure, undisclosed location” that the Secret Service rushed Cheney to just after the attacks. Other top administration officials met him there over the follow days.

When asked if he ever broke down and cried in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as had President George W. Bush and other top officials, Cheney said, “Not really,” and then grinned sheepishly as the crowd giggled.

“You understand that people will find that peculiar,” Hayes noted.

“It wasn’t that it wasn’t a deeply moving event,” Cheney responded. “The training just sort of kicked in, in terms of what we had to do that morning and into the next day.”