Former Vice President Dick Cheney, America’s greatest champion of enhanced interrogation, has not yet read the so-called “torture report” being released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, but that isn’t stopping him from preemptively criticizing it.
Cheney spoke with the New York Times’s Peter Baker on Monday about the report, which details the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation of terrorist suspects under the Bush administration.
“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” he said. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”
Baker noted that Cheney had not yet read the report, but was basing his opinion on news coverage of its expected contents. Cheney also offered praise for the CIA officials who are likely to come under scrutiny after the report’s release.
“They deserve a lot of praise,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized.”
And he expressed no regrets about the program.
“If I had to do it over again,” Cheney said. “I would do it.”
He’d do it all over again? I though W. was president at the time? Also, can anyone explain to me why this terror report release will make American’s less safe? Will ISIL be more likely to decapitate Americans because the fact that we tortured “enemy combatants” is now being acknowledged in an official document?
Tortures, such as waterboarding, were designed by diabolical regimes to extract confessions from people who didn’t commit the crimes. The tortures are not designed to find out truths or facts. They are designed to break people down–so far down they’ll choose being a scapegoat over enduring more torture.
According to John McCain, we executed captured Japanese officers for waterboarding US prisoners.
“I think that’s all a bunch of hooey."
Dick’s getting senile. The bunch of hooey was the so called “intelligence” that supported weapons of mass destruction. Now THAT was HOOEY.
Dick Cheney lives in his own perverted universe. I say let him rot there. He’s best ignored, as we move away from the dark horror that was the Bush administration.
Today Republicans will be trying to use Obamacare to distract us from Torturer-in-Chief and his Dick?