Dick Cheney wrapped up his book tour on home turf this morning at the American Enterprise Institute. The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes — the official Cheney biographer and famous peddler of the false “connection” between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda — moderated the event and eventually got to the sticky topic of torture. In what he called “a thoughtful critique,” Hayes asked Cheney to respond to those who argue “the things that we did amounted to torture and the sense that maybe the moral position of the United States was eroded because of the things that we did here in this country.”

Cheney dismissed the question, saying they waterboarded only “a handful” of people, which, he claimed, “produced phenomenal results”:

CHENEY: When we get into the whole area of one of the most controversial techniques, waterboarding. … Three people were waterboarded — not dozens, not hundreds. Three. And the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheik Mohammad and it produced phenomenal results for us.

There are reports that the intelligence committee did of the results of the program which were declassified at my request and are now available on the internet that talk about the quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques applied to a handful of individuals. We are talking about only a handful of people who were indeed part of the al Qaeda organization.

Watch it:

The “reports” Cheney is presumably referring to are two CIA documents the agency released in 2009 — at Cheney’s request. However, they do not prove torture worked and in fact, they “actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.”

The bottom line is that there is no evidence to support Cheney’s claim that torture “produced phenomenal results.” “What we got [from waterboarding] was pabulum,” said one FBI agent. A former senior CIA official said most of what came from waterboarding “was total f*cking bullsh*t.” “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence,” said another former Pentagon analyst.

“[Cheney] fears being tried as a war criminal,” former top Colin Powell aide Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said last month, “This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney.’”

Neoconservative Hudson Institute pundit Lee Smith seems very upset with the Obama administration. Reacting to retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ comments, reported by Jeffrey Goldberg, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an ungrateful ally, Smith wrote in the Weekly Standard that the Obama administration is to blame for Israel’s growing isolation. Smith, reading deep into the Pentagon’s motives, explains:

Gates is upset because, while the White House has provided the Israelis with “access to top-quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing,” the administration hasn’t gotten what it really wants in exchange—movement on the peace process, according to Goldberg. Of course, the Israelis haven’t gotten what they really want either—action on Iran—and the Pentagon’s munificence is partly intended to deter the Israelis from taking matters into their own hands.

Smith seems to think “action on Iran” can only possibly mean a military attack, revealing both his designs and what he thinks the Israelis want. But his analysis is nonetheless off the mark. In fact, the Obama administration has taken many wide-ranging steps both to slow down the Iranian nuclear program and find a solution that averts military action.

For instance, the United Nations Security Council, shepherded by the U.S. in a renewed era of Obama multilateral diplomacy, passed sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program in 2010. This May, a U.N. Experts Panel said the sanctions “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”

There’s also, as Smith notes, been great military and intelligence cooperation on Iran between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s government. Smith generally mentions the cooperation in passing, but fails to address perhaps its most dramatic facet: when Israel and the U.S. worked together on the Stuxnet computer virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Exactly how much is uncertain, but no serious analysts challenge that it did slow the program. After the Stuxnet cyber-attack was widely reported, legendary Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan pushed back Israel’s estimate for when Iran would get a bomb to 2015 at the earliest.

President Obama also changed the tone of discourse with Iran from the hawkish Bush administration approach that spurned talking and rejected cooperation, which led to even more sour relations. Negotiations over the nuclear program and other subjects have yet to yield fruits, but, according to Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, the Obama approach has helped in other ways. In 2010, Ganji spoke with CAP analyst Matt Duss and told him Obama’s shift opened up the political space that made possible the rise of the Green opposition movement:

Asked about the impact of President Obama’s approach to Iran, Ganji praised the change in rhetoric, and suggested that it helped create a favorable environment for the Iranian democracy movement. “Obama offered a dialog with the Iran,” Ganji said, “and this change in discourse immediately gave rise to that outpouring of sentiment against the Islamic Republic last year.”

There can be little doubt that Israel wishes for regime change in Iran, yet giving breathing space to the most broad indigenous opposition movement to emerge in Iran since the fall of the Shah in 1979 doesn’t seem to be enough for Smith.

If by “action,” Smith is limiting himself to talking about bombing Iran, he ought to drop the euphemism and say so. And, indeed, the Obama administration has not gone that route, probably because analysts — even military analysts at pro-Israel think tanks — widely agree that such a course would be dangerous and potentially disastrous. Only neocons seem to disagree.

President Bush sat down with USA Today to discuss the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and his role in shaping U.S. policy in their aftermath. During the interview, Bush thought he’d take the opportunity to pat himself on the back for Osama bin Laden’s death:

Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.

“The work that was done by intelligence communities during my presidency was part of putting together the puzzle that enabled us to see the full picture of how bin Laden was communicating and eventually where he was hiding,” he said. “It began the day after 9/11.”

The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures. While it’s been well documented that the Bush administration missed an opportunity to get bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, Bush himself subsequently stated publicly that he wasn’t spending much time thinking about getting him. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq,” Bush said in 2002, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.” Bush told reporters in 2006 that hunting the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.”

And in 2005, Bush shut down the CIA’s unit dedicated to finding bin Laden in order to shift resources to Iraq. “The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported in 2006, adding that resources “had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.” When the right wing rushed to give Bush credit after bin Laden’s death in May, ThinkProgress produced this short video highlighting Bush’s failures:

Soon after he took office, President Obama steered the U.S. on a course to end the war in Iraq and put resources back into finding bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”