Waterboarding and other CIA interrogation techniques on terror suspects were justified and "totally authorized" – and an expected Senate report on the use of torture is "a bunch of hooey," former Vice President Dick Cheney says.
In an interview with
The New York Times, Cheney said he hadn't yet read the Senate Intelligence Committee report, due Tuesday.
But he said he's heard nothing to persuade him Central Intelligence Agency techniques used after the 9/11 attacks were not "absolutely totally justified."
"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 told The Times.
"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."
Cheney said he never thought the CIA was withholding information from him or the White House about the nature of the program, as the report is expected to charge — nor did he think the agency exaggerated the value of the intelligence gained from those techniques.
And he declared the report's conclusion that the CIA misled the White House "is just a crock."
"They deserve a lot of praise," he said of the CIA veterans involved in the program. "As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized."
"When we had that program in place, we kept the country safe from any more mass casualty attacks, which was our objective," calling it "the right thing to do.
"And," he added, "if I had to do it over again, I would do it."
The 6,000-page report from the Democratic-led Intelligence Committee is expected to say the CIA overstated the results of interrogations — and to
conclude they didn't lead to intelligence preventing attacks that couldn't have been obtained otherwise.
Former President George W. Bush,
in an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, also bashed the report's slant, calling CIA leaders "patriots" and saying any report that diminished them was "off base."
Cheney argued the program itself was worth it, suggesting Democrats were trying to cover up their own involvement.
"It occurs to me it was sort of a cover for those on the Democratic side who were briefed on the program, but then were subsequently embarrassed to admit that and so are going back to construct a rationale to say, 'They didn’t tell us the truth,'" Cheney told The Times.
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