Washington Bureau Blog

Category: The Michigan delegation

Levin, Cheney and the 'L' word (not the one on the TV show)

A speech this week by Sen. Carl Levin has gotten plenty of attention from the blogosphere for its tough-edged rebuttal to former Vice President Dick Cheney's claims about tough interrogation tactics.

Levin does not quite accuse the former vice president of lying. But he doesn't miss it by much. Levin adopts the biblical phrasing "he bore false witness" to describe Cheney's claim that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were an isolated incident. Levin says the recently released report on interrogations by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs, "gives the lie" to Cheney's assertions. And he says Cheney makes "other false statements," including the assertion that interrogation tactics used on terror detainees were identical to those used to train U.S. troops how to survive in captivity.

But perhaps the most interesting section of the speech is Levin's statement that, contrary to claims by Cheney and others, documents the former vice president has asked to be declassified do not demonstrate that the use of techniques such as water boarding saved lives or prevented terror attacks.

"Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked," Levin says. "But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction."

As the chair of the Armed Services Committee and an ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Levin would have access to such documents. And he's clearly saying they don't prove the case Cheney has made for weeks. If and when they're declassified, those documents are likely to be among the most closely scrutinized historical artifacts of the Bush-Cheney era.