Cheney defends CIA, says tactics not 'torture'

Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2009. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2009. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)

WASHINGTON -- Dick Cheney, who as vice president was a powerful sponsor of the brutal interrogation tactics used on detainees suspected of being linked to al-Qaida, on Sunday escalated his counterattack on the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, which found that the CIA's now-defunct program violated American values, was incompetently run and produced little useful intelligence.

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"I would do it again in a minute," Cheney said in a spirited, emotional appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the past four attorneys general had agreed with his view.

"Torture is what the al-Qaida terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11," Cheney said. "There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation."

Cheney was also pressed to answer questions on detainees who had faced lengthy incarceration before being found not culpable. The former vice president responded that, in his mind, the greater problem was "with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield."

Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up detainees, he replied, "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective."

Cheney said President George W. Bush was fully briefed on interrogation tactics. The report said Bush wasn't briefed on specific CIA techniques until April 2006 -- four years after the program had begun.

"The notion that we were not notified at the White House about what was going on is not true," Cheney said.

"This man knew what we were doing," Cheney said of Bush. "He authorized it. He approved it. A statement by the Senate Democrats for partisan purposes that the president didn't know what was going on is just a flat-out lie."

In concluding Bush was kept largely in the dark about specific techniques being used in the field, the Senate committee report states that CIA records show that no CIA officer briefed the president on them before April 2006. "By that time, 38 of the 39 detainees identified as having been subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques had already been subjected to the techniques," the report states.

Cheney said Bush learned of the interrogations through daily meetings with the CIA director and national security advisers.

"That's where we got most of our information," Cheney said, along with the President's Daily Brief, a top-secret written report on intelligence matters.

Bush portrayed himself as intimately familiar with the interrogation techniques in his 2010 memoir, Decision Points.

Cheney's latest remarks were part of a barrage of commentary attempting to undercut the Senate's blistering report on the CIA program. Defenders of interrogation methods long considered torture, including waterboarding, outnumbered those criticizing such methods on Sunday morning's round of television interview shows from Washington.

Also featured on the shows was Michael Hayden, the former CIA director; Jose Rodriguez Jr., the former agency official who ran the program; and the top Republicans on the Congressional intelligence committees -- Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan. All have stuck up for the CIA's methods and denounced the Senate report as a flawed and partisan work.

"This report throws the CIA under the bus," Rodriguez said on Fox News Sunday. "Leaders at the agency are going to wonder whether the authorities that they received from their president will last longer than one election phase. That's a big concern."

Rodriguez reiterated Republican assertions that key members of Congress were fully briefed on all the techniques used by the CIA, which some lawmakers have disputed.

"We came to learn very gradually about it," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. and former member of the intelligence committee. "We did not really understand this program until a considerable period of time had gone by," he said on Fox.

Most prominent of those supporting the Senate report's findings and denouncing the CIA methods was Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose remarks on CBS' Face the Nation underscored how lonely his position has become in the Republican Party. McCain was tortured by his North Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war, an experience that left him with the deep conviction that the United States should never use such tactics.

McCain said some defenders of the CIA program were engaging in "rewriting of history" and whitewashing torture.

"What we need to do is come clean, we move forward, and we vow never to do it again," he said. "I urge everyone to just read the report -- these are the communications within the CIA as to what happened. You can't claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture."

John Yoo, the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration who wrote the legal justification for the techniques that President Barack Obama has called torture, said tactics such as week-long sleep deprivation and forced standing for hours with broken limbs were never approved.

"If those things happened as they're described in the report, as you describe them, those were not authorized by the Justice Department," Yoo said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS program. "They were not supposed to be done and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press that he plans to introduce legislation so that "if torture is used in the future there would be a basis to prosecute."

The Senate committee's report, researched and written by Democratic staff members after Republicans dropped out of the project, is a 6,000-page study based on a review of more than 6 million pages of CIA records. It is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date, and its damning conclusions are based strictly on what CIA officers were themselves reporting at the time.

The portrait it paints of a program that was not just brutal but also incompetent has drawn global comment and has been welcomed by the United Nations and human-rights groups.

In Britain, Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, told the BBC on Sunday that the panel investigating allegations of British involvement in torture would request access to information not made public in the Senate report that may pertain to Britain's role in the interrogation.

Prime Minister David Cameron's office has acknowledged that some parts of the report were blacked out for national security reasons, but says none of it related to any alleged British involvement that in "activity that would be unlawful in the U.K." The requests for the material to be omitted from the executive summary published last week was made by British intelligence agencies to the CIA, rather than the government.

The CIA report has led to demands that Britain halt negotiations with the United States over the use of Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the Indian Ocean where the Americans have a military base. Britain has previously acknowledged that Diego Garcia was twice used by the U.S. as a refueling stop during the 2002 secret transfers of two terrorism suspects.

The 50-year agreement allowing the Americans to use the island runs out in 2016.

Information for this article was contributed by Scott Shane of The New York Times; by David Lerman of Bloomberg News; and by Stephen Braun, Michele Salcedo and Danica Kirka of The Associated Press.

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