Dick Cheney Says Harsh Interrogations Kept U.S. Safe From Terror

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that the CIA's extreme interrogation techniques "were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years [after 9/11] we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States." He described the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate alleged torture as a political move and a "terrible, terrible precedent." In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Cheney called the use of waterboarding and other coercive methods—like threatening detainees with guns or drills—key weapons in the war on terrorism. "I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved," added Cheney, who noted that neither a gun nor a drill had actually been used on detainees. There also have been reports of agents threatening detainees' relatives with rape. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said such techniques violated the Geneva Convention on torture, helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists, and produced unreliable intelligence. McCain added, though, that an investigation was a mistake that might harm CIA morale and effectiveness. "I think it harmed our image in the world," McCain said of detainee abuse in an interview on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday, "but for us now to go back, I think, would be a serious mistake." What do you think? Is Cheney right? Do the ends justify the means? And what, precisely, were the ends that warranted extreme coercion? Weigh in below.

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