Backing C.I.A. Tactics, Cheney Ramps Up Criticism of Senate Torture Report
He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general had agreed with his view.
“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said. “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”
Mr. 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.”
.. “I urge everyone to just read the report — these are the communications within the C.I.A. as to what happened. You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture.”
.. 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 six million pages of C.I.A. records. It is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date, and its damning conclusions are based strictly on what C.I.A. officers were themselves reporting at the time.
.. Waterboarding was not used, as least with official approval, after 2003. So Mr. Cheney is, in part, defending his own influence in the first Bush term against the retreat from the most aggressive methods in the second term.