Kieffer asked again about the political implications of former Vice-President Cheney's high-profile role in the torture controversy.
"How do you view the 'front and center' role of former Vice-President Dick Cheney as the foremost defender of the Bush administration within recent days?" asked Kieffer.
"I just don't think Dick Cheney has any credibility at all left. Here's someone who consistently lied, and I use that word in all of its meaning, lied to the American people about Iraq, about Saddam Hussein, about weapons of mass destruction. He is the only vice-president in history who went down to the CIA and inserted himself in CIA operations as the vice-president. So, Cheney, to me, is someone who had a world view, he had a belief in what the world was like, and what our enemies were like, and the real world did not comport with his belief system. Now he wants to continue to say that his belief system trumps everything, whereas the facts and reality are completely different," said Harkin.
"From a purely partisan perspective as a Democrat you must be happy to see someone like Cheney with such low approval ratings be the public face of the opposition," said Kieffer.
"Well, when Dick Cheney gets up and denigrates Colin Powell and holds up as the epitome of what a Republican is Rush Limbaugh, I can understand why more and more moderate Republicans are becoming Democrats," replied Harkin.
Powell, Secretary of State during former President George W. Bush's first term, endorsed Obama during the final weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign. Powell's former Chief-of-Staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, testified on June 18, 2008 before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights hearing on torture that well over 100 detainees had died in U.S. custody and that 27 of those deaths had officially been declared to be homicides.
Cheney's office is widely reported to have been at the center of the Bush administration's "enhanced" or "harsh interrogation technique" policy. On December 15, 2008, Cheney told ABC News that, "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the [CIA] in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."
After WWII, the U.S. government tried and convicted Japanese military officers of war crimes for waterboarding prisoners.
On May 10, Cheney told CBS's Face the Nation that President Obama's decision to dismantle the Bush administration's interrogation programs had made the USA more susceptible to terrorist attacks.
In an article published on May 14, Wilkerson, a Republican, wrote, "...what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002-well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion-its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida. So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee 'was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop. There in fact were no such contacts."
Funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, known as the "Global War on Terror" during the Bush administration but re-branded in late March as "Overseas Contingency Operations" by the Obama administration, is dependent upon Appropriations Committee approval.
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