A key Democratic senator Sunday criticized a US Justice Department investigation into abusive CIA interrogations of Al-Qaeda detainees as poorly timed, signaling broadening opposition to the probe.
Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised her objections in a CBS television interview while former vice president Dick Cheney was blasting the probe on Fox television as “an outrageous political act.”
Saying she, too, was “horrified” by a classified 2004 Central Intelligence Agency report that detailed abusive interrogation practices, Feinstein said she understood Attorney General Eric Holder’s reasons for ordering a review of the interrogation program.
“However, I think the timing of this is not very good,” Feinstein said.
She said the intelligence committee was already well along in conducting a bipartisan “total look” at the interrogation and detention techniques used on so-called high value detainees.
“And candidly, I wish that the attorney general had waited,” she said.
The Obama administration Monday set the country on a course to confront whether actions taken in the name of defending Americans instead crossed criminal lines.
In simultaneous moves, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. opened an investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law and the administration complied with a judge’s order and released a long-secret CIA report that cataloged allegations of agency prisoner abuse.
The administration also released memos sought in recent months by former Vice President Dick Cheney that he argued attest to the success of the CIA’s controversial methods, but that appeared inconclusive in part because the agency had blacked out large portions of the memos.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney believes his old boss, President George W. Bush, gradually turned away from his advice during their second term in the White House, showing a surprising independence as he started taking more flexible positions on a range of issues, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Cheney, often described as the most influential vice president in U.S. history, has been discussing his years in office in informal talks with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues, the Post said, as he works on a memoir due out in 2011 from Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.
In back-to-back speeches, President Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney faced off yesterday, both forcefully presenting their sharply different views on how to keep America safe from terrorism, the effectiveness of harsh interrogations, and whether the 240 Guantanamo Bay detainees pose an imminent danger if brought to American soil
Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has defended the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation methods, saying they were necessary to get information from terrorists and save American lives.
President Barack Obama said Thursday some of the terror suspects held at Guantanamo would be brought to prisons in the United States despite fierce opposition in Congress. He promised to work with lawmakers to develop a system for imprisoning detainees who can’t be tried and can’t be turned loose.
