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Analysis: Dick Cheney’s claims reopen ‘waterboarding’ debate

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday said his claim that enhanced interrogation techniques — including waterboarding — produced critical post-9/11 information was supported by a pair of intelligence reports released last week. “The enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” However, the two dossiers that were declassified at Cheney’s request do not disclose what kinds of techniques were used to elicit the intelligence. The only method occasionally cited by the reports is a routine one — using information from one detainee to gain details from another.

Waterboarding: A Mental as Well as Physical Trauma

In Chile, they called it submarino, a form of simulated drowning that has much the same effect as what we call waterboarding. During Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship, thousands of Chileans were detained by the military and subjected to torture. During the submarino, they were forcibly submerged in a tank of water, over and over again, until they were on the edge of drowning.

How Waterboarding Got Out of Control

For years, the Bush Administration defended its harsh interrogation methods against accusations of torture by portraying them as a measured intelligence gathering tool that wouldn’t be allowed to get out of hand.

Why Obama Needs to Reveal Even More on Torture

So far, so good: The Administration was absolutely right to declassify the Department of Justice-CIA interrogation memos. The argument that the letters compromise national security does not hold water. As noted in the memos, the interrogations techniques are taken from the military’s escape and evasion training manuals, known as SERE — which in turn were taken from Chinese abusive interrogations used on our troops during the Korean War.