Robert Windrem, who covered terrorism for NBC, reports exclusively in The Daily Beast that:

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

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.

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner came from the Office of Vice President Cheney.

"To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

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."

...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.)...

But, Duelfer says, Khudayr in fact repeatedly denied knowing the location of WMD or links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda and was not subjected to any enhanced interrogation. Duelfer says the idea that he would have known of such links was "ludicrous".

The NBC analysis also showed--and agency and commission staffers concur--there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, specifically conducted to answer new questions from the 9/11 Commission after its lawyers had been left unsatisfied by the agency's internal interrogation reports.

Who was running the White House for the previous eight years, really?

Who was really pissed that there were no WMD's discovered in Iraq?

Who was really, really pissed that the 'Nuclear Threat' of Saddam never existed and that the CIA would go ahead and tend to prove that point?

Who was really, really, really pissed that he could not find any tangible relationship between Saddam, al Qaeda and 9/11/01?

Cheney did get so mad that he told his henchmen that he did not care if it took 100 waterboardings, HE WANTED THAT LINK.

Cheney was not worried about an imminent threat. This was no Jack Bauer episode, tick, tick, tick, tick....

This waterboarding had nothing to do with protecting this country.

This waterboarding was ordered to cover the vp's arse. To provide some basis, any basis for the invasion of Iraq.

PERIOD

Geez, almost two AM and I am so pissed....

Windrem's book is going to be something to behold indeed!!!!!

Update: Take the time to reall all the comments here but Seashell got me to thinking and then I read the article at TPM this morning by Steve Clemons who attacks cheney directly for his latest round of propagnda:

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney's watch than on any other leader's watch in US history.  (That is the 9/11/01 attack, Steve is underlining that it occurred under w's watch)

Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11--much touted by Cheney--is due almost entirely to the nation's having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to "the Cheney method of interrogation."

Third--and here comes the blistering fact--when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

Steve notes that the entire enhanced interrogative torture ENDED BEFORE w's second term.

I am beginning to see that our New President had no trouble shooting down what amounts to executive orders that had been moot for four years.

I glean from Steve's prose that people in the w administration were frightened. THEY KNEW THEY HAD SCREWED UP. And they gave up attempting to prove the three main bases for out invasion.

Read his entire article.