And will anyone other than Senator Carl Levin stand up to him?

When the senator from Michigan addressed the Foreign Policy Association's annual dinner at the end of May, he was one of the few high-profile Democrats to confront Cheney, accusing him of lying about torture and detention.

As chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Levin presided over an inquiry into detainees in U.S. custody and the publishing of a report on the inquiry. He is also an ex-officio member of the Senate Intelligence committee.

It doesn't take a security clearance to prove that the former vice president is lying. But Levin's access to classified documents did serve one purpose. He referred to CIA reports that Cheney wants declassified to vindicate the previous administration's use of what Cheney calls "enhanced interrogation techniques."

"Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked," Levin said. "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."

There is a certain irony in Cheney betting on the CIA to validate his version of history. I spent most of 2005 working on a book on Cheney. His relationship with the CIA, according to agency sources, was contemptuous and abusive.

Cheney's contempt for the agency goes back to the Gerald Ford administration. There, first as deputy chief of staff and later as chief of staff, Cheney supported a group of academics doing a comparative analysis of CIA programs. The group—called Team B—included Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. It operated under the assumption that the agency was "soft on the Soviet Union." Almost all of Team B's conclusions proved false.

As vice president, Cheney fired two of his personal CIA briefers because he was unsatisfied with the intelligence they provided on Iraq. It was an unprecedented act. In the run up to the Iraq War, Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, visited CIA headquarters at least eight times to work on intelligence. Equally unprecedented. A CIA report described the pressure to which Cheney subjected agents as "brutal."

The vice president is a thug.

As is his daughter Liz, who has taken to the airways to defend Dad and torture. At the State Department, where she served as the principal deputy assistant for Near Eastern Affairs, Ms. Cheney tolerated no dissenting opinions, according to a source there. On two occasions while traveling in the Middle East, she informed U.S. ambassadors that she would be meeting with the head of state without them, according to an interview I did with Colin Powell's aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Ms. Cheney told one of the ambassadors to call Washington if he didn't like her decision. Meeting a head of state without the U.S. ambassador is unheard of.

The former vice president gets airtime because he's the former vice president. His daughter has been so thoroughly discredited that she should be paying infomercial rates.

Her argument on ABC's Good Morning America, that waterboarding is not torture because "we've done it to our own people," is refuted in the Senate Armed Services Committee report.

Waterboarding was used in a program to prepare American soldiers for harsh interrogation. But according to the report, there was "medical and psychological screening…interventions by trained psychologists during training, and code words to ensure the student can stop the application of a technique at any time should a need arise."

Detainees in U.S. custody got a different deal.

Cheney père's argument that torture at Abu Ghraib was the work of rogue guards is also thoroughly discredited in the report: "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

The rogues were political appointees at the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the Office of the Vice President. The 2008 report (available at ) provides a documented account of the extraordinary pressure those rogue officials exerted on the military in order to make torture U.S. policy. No state secrets here. But worthwhile reading for anyone watching the Cheneys attempt to rewrite history.

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