Dick Cheney Quotes
The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people. I mean, these are terrorists for the most part.
Cheney, Dick. Interview by Brit Hume. Special Report with Brit Hume, Fox News, 23 June 2005.
The American military and CIA officials made a number of errors in dealing with some of the prisoners. Once military desecrated a Muslim Holy Book with urine, many or the active and violent prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, but secrecy allowed Islamic propagandists to claim that this was done with almost all. Worst of all CIA interrogators were allowed to use ‘enhanced techniques’ (torture). Prisoners were not allowed to have reasonable contact to attorneys and where there were, these were monitored. Most of the prisoners were never charged with anything and yet they never received sentences and no one had any idea whether or not they would ever be charged, tried, sentenced or released. Even where there were some prisoners that the American authorities were willing to release, only a few were as their original counties would not accept them. Islamic extremist terrorist recruiters use Guantanamo to propagandize against America, and many new terrorist recruits were primarily motivated they claimed by the way that fellow Muslims had been treated in Guantanamo. Almost all agreed that Guantanamo was a negative, but it became very difficult to close it down and despite all the errors of operation, very few Americans were willing to return all these men to the battlefield to re-jojn the terrorists and other countries were unwilling to take the responsibility for their custody.
After September 11, the Department of Homeland Security was formed. The new department combined a host of other disparate departments and organizations and one result was that threats and terrorist targets were so broadly defined with a paucity of specific intelligence that almost everything was a target so that nothing could receive more security and protection than anything else.
At that point they were imprisoned in Guantanemo, a military facility in Cuba.
The press were asking about the claim that the United States were sending detainees (“rendition” it is called) in the War on Terrorism to countries where they are tortured in ways that United States law prohibited. This quotation is an excellent illustration of the nuanced language that is sometimes used by politicians with the press. For example this statement was made in the Press Conference about our Human Rights Annual report. In it specific countries were named and accused of torturing prisoners or suspects. The press had learned that detainees had been renditioned to those same countries. Lowenkron went on to explain that U. S. officials had explained to officials of the countries to which detainees had been renditioned that the detainees should not be tortured; therefore they did not BELIEVE that they would be. So the statement was “correct” whether or not they detainees had been tortured. In another nuance, some people wondered what “we” meant—the United States or the State Department. Perhaps the State Department followed this policy and practice but the CIA may not have.
After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat hundreds of Egyptian religious fundamentalists were rounded up, jailed and tortured. al-Zawahiri broke under torture and revealed the names of some of his anti-government associates. Although he was not personally involved in the murder of Sadat, he served three additional years in jail. Motivated by has thirst for revenge at his torturers and his guilt at having been forced to betray his friend, he learned all he could about terrorism from the older Jihadists also in the same jail, and when he was released he elevated Islamic terrorism to another level by developing a strategy for the use of suicide bombers.
Richard Bruce Cheney is an American politician and businessman who served as the 46th vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009 under George W. Bush. He has been cited as the most powerful vice president in American history. He is also one of the most unpopular American politicians, holding an approval rating of just 13% upon leaving office. Cheney has been the oldest living former U.S. vice president since 2021, following the death of Walter Mondale.
