OF CHENEY, BLOGGERS AND FACT CHECKING.

So in my earlier post I noted that the fact that the documents Dick Cheney long sought to have declassified don't actually prove that torture worked is a classic Bush administration move. But what's fascinating is that it seems to have worked again, as Greg Sargent points out that many major news organizations haven't actually taken a look at whether the documents actually prove Cheney's claims, and Justin Elliott points out that Cheney himself has moved the goalposts from his original statement.

Spencer Ackerman highlighted Cheney's original claim from April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

This is the Cheney statement cited by Elliott today:

"The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda."

As I noted earlier, the documents don't actually say what information was gained from torture and what wasn't, and as Elliott points out, Cheney's statement no longer makes the claim that the EITs provided the actual intelligence--but rather that the intelligence came from people who were subjected to EITs. We've gone from "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" to "weapons of mass destruction related activities" in about four months--not that anyone outside the blogosphere seems to have noticed.

Not to belabor this point too much, but in case it isn't obvious from this post, none of the major news organizations were looking very closely at Cheney's claims and whether the documents actually prove what he said, and several of the accounts I've read could have been written without having even set eyes on the documents themselves. As far as I can tell, it's bloggers doing all the "fact-checking".

Maybe Chris Matthews should worry a little more about his own colleagues.

UPDATE: Ben Smith gets a statement from an anonymous Cheney aide:

"As the vice president has said repeatedly, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided critical intelligence that saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. The documents released yesterday demonstrate that conclusively. Anyone who doubts that hasn't read the documents," said the Cheney source.

We are in Orwell country now. The documents don't "demonstrate" that, the 2004 IG report states that outright without offering any conclusive evidence to support the assertion. There's no "demonstration" of the sort Cheney was referring to in his April statement. The only people who are saying the documents "demonstrate conclusively" that Cheney's claims are true haven't read them, or are anonymous Cheney aides.

-- A. Serwer