WASHINGTON — In the bitter debate over the nation's counter-terrorism policies, former Vice President Dick Cheney has introduced an assertion that substantially raises the stakes.
Twice in the last two weeks -- including during his speaking duel with President Obama on Thursday -- Cheney has said that the Bush administration's approach may have saved "hundreds of thousands" of lives.
It is a claim that goes beyond anything Cheney or former President George W. Bush said while in office -- crediting their approach with preventing casualties on a scale that the United States has not seen since World War II.
But terrorism experts said that though it is possible to envision scenarios that involve casualties of that magnitude, no evidence has emerged about the plots disrupted during the Bush administration to suggest that Cheney's claim is true.
"It's an easy thing to say and a difficult thing to prove," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "I think it's another broadside in this ongoing feud."
Cheney first used the language during a May 10 appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"I'm convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives," he said.
Cheney's assertion is plausible if he is referring to concerns that Al Qaeda had ambitions of acquiring a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon, said Gary J. Schmitt, an intelligence expert at the American Enterprise Institute, where Cheney delivered his speech Thursday.
"Because they disrupted the leadership of Al Qaeda," Schmitt said, Cheney can reasonably argue that "they were able in some larger sense to preclude a [weapons of mass destruction] attack in the years ahead."
But in his second reference to six-figure casualties, Cheney went further, saying that those lives were saved as a direct result of the CIA's use of waterboarding and other so-called "enhanced" interrogation methods.
"The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results," Cheney said in his speech Thursday, "because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people."
That assertion is more difficult to support, experts said, because there is no evidence that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or other Al Qaeda suspects formerly in CIA custody yielded intelligence on plots involving nuclear or other mass-casualty weapons.
