The Smoking Gun For Dick Cheney

And no, this is not from the Smoking Gun, it's from The Daily Beast, and it's a big one.

Specifically, Robert Windrem, formerly a senior investigative producer with NBC News, has uncovered information that the office of the Vice President specifically requested that the a senior Iraqi official be waterboarded so as to extract a statement that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in league and cooperating on terrorism:

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

...

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney’s office and will post a response if we get one.)

(emphasis mine)

This isn't about a ticking time bomb. This isn't about ongoing plans. This is a request to torture someone until they say something that benefits you politically.

Can we put him on trial now?

Yes, I know that OVP does not necessarily equal Dick Cheney, but we also know that his office would not make such a request without his tacit or explicit approval.