The key here is Cheney’s failure to connect the use of the so-called EITs to the extraction of the “bulk of intelligence.” The distinction amounts to a walk back of Cheney’s position all along — that interrogators culled valuable intel using the techniques. That the detainees in question provided intelligence is not in dispute.

Cheney is not claiming a causal relationship between torture and the intelligence gleaned from interrogations. Rather, he’s saying that the same individuals who were tortured also happened to yield the most important evidence about Al Qaeda. He’s not saying that the docs proved torture was responsible for producing that info.

Rather, he claims only that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” This statement is neither in dispute, nor much of a revelation. The enhanced techniques, when they were used as designed and not by rogue agents without proper supervision, were employed on a select few detainees who knew a lot about al Qaeda. The outstanding question is whether the enhanced techniques were necessary to produce the information, and on that score the memos continue to paint a muddy picture.

Now that the memos have been released—with redactions—they provide no clarity to the question Cheney claimed they would answer: Did the enhanced techniques produce results? Rather the two memos describe the value of information provided by Al Qaeda detainees, which one memo calls a “crucial pillar of counterterrorism efforts.” The memos, as redacted, are silent on the role of harsh interrogation in producing that information. One memo describes another effective technique—dubbed the “building block” process—that did produce significant information. This process is an standard technique, of confronting one detainee with information from another detainee to produce more information. It does not involve any physical coercion. Does Cheney want other parts of the same memo, which were redacted in the latest release, made public? It is unclear.

In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, 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 second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.”

Again, Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

“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.

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.