‘The last administration left us in a weaker posture than we’ve been any time since World War II: less regarded in the world, stretched more thinly than we have ever been in the past, two wars under way, virtually no respect in entire parts of the world.”

These remarks by US vice-president Joe Biden on Tuesday were in response to those made by his predecessor Dick Cheney two weeks ago in defence of the Bush administration’s detention camps at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. These were necessary, Mr Cheney insisted, for the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of “keeping the country safe”. The intelligence gained prevented further 9/11 attacks, he asserted. “I think it’s a great success story”. He went on to say the Obama administration has made the US less safe during its brief time in office and is continuing to do so.

Mr Cheney has evidently not lost the dark art of fighting tough, mean, dirty politics. Republican diehards are hereby trying to pin responsibility for any more terrorist attacks on the Obama administration. This explains why Mr Biden yesterday, and Mr Obama shortly after Mr Cheney’s intervention, so strongly denied it by saying the facts don’t bear out his contention that effectively torture saves lives.

Quite how damaging Guantánamo has been and will continue to be for the regard, respect and reputation of the US is revealed in the Red Cross report on some of its interrogations just published by the New York Review of Books. This chronicles how 14 “high value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in 2006 were treated in detention, as they explained in private interviews with the Red Cross the following year – four years after the organisation requested access to them. The Red Cross has confirmed it is a legitimate but secret document, regretting it has been leaked.

It is a horrifying account of beatings, waterboarding, suffocation, prolonged stress standing and nudity, exposure to extreme cold and other ill-treatments. Many of them are drawn from techniques used by Chinese, Russian and North Korean regimes, according to an accompanying commentary by journalism professor Mark Danner. On any adequate legal definition they amount to torture, notwithstanding legal advice to the Bush administration that this was not so. This raises the question of what Mr Cheney means by saying the interrogations revealed intelligence which prevented further attacks and Mr Obama’s denial of that. Any public investigation should address this question head on.