Cheney: 'I'd do it again in a minute' He says the CIA’s actions did not amount to torture.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney unapologetically pressed his defense of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques Sunday, insisting that waterboarding and other such tactics did not amount to torture and that the spy agency’s actions paled in comparison to those of terrorists targeting Americans.

“Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There’s this notion that there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we do, and that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture.”


Cheney also disputed the notion that any American taken prisoner overseas by terrorists was now at greater risk of being subjected to techniques like those used by the CIA.

“He’s not likely to be waterboarded. He’s likely to have his head cut off,” the former vice president said of a potential American taken hostage by a group like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. “I haven’t seen them waterboard anybody.”

( Also on POLITICO: Feds in 2-front fight against release of records on CIA 'torture')

While a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the interrogation program shocked many with its vivid descriptions of one unresponsive prisoner frothing at the mouth after waterboarding and others shackled from bars in stress positions for prolonged periods, Cheney was unrepentant.

He repeatedly dismissed the Senate inquiry as “partisan” but seemed entirely comfortable with a public discussion of the once-secret techniques.

Indeed, Cheney seemed proud of his role in creating the interrogation program.

“I’d do it again in a minute,” he declared.

( Also on POLITICO: Bill Clinton: Let's push for more info on CIA torture)

Asked if the report created “any seed of doubt” for him about the wisdom of the CIA effort, Cheney replied: “No … absolutely not.”

Despite being pressed by host Chuck Todd to offer a definition of torture, Cheney did not go beyond saying the Justice Department provided legal approvals for the program, which was blasted last week in a long-awaited report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel’s study found that the interrogation effort was badly mismanaged, abandoned or never used safeguards it was supposed to follow and failed to produce the kind of critical intelligence that CIA and Bush White House officials said justified the program.

At one point during the NBC interview, the former vice president appeared to suggest that anything the CIA or its personnel did could not have amounted to torture, regardless of the brutality of the conduct.

Asked about revelations in the newly released report about “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding” as part of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program, Cheney said he believes those procedures were undertaken for “medical reasons,” even though many medical experts said they are not.

( Also on POLITICO: Hayden defends CIA's use of rectal rehydration)

“It wasn’t torture in terms of it wasn’t part of the program,” the former vice president said.

As the interview aired in Washington, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein streamed messages out on Twitter countering Cheney.

“Torture didn’t work,” Feinstein wrote. “CIA personnel ‘disturbed’ by use of torture, ‘some to the point of tears and choking up.’”

Cheney expressed no regrets as he discussed the torture controversy Sunday, even regarding the detention and aggressive interrogation of prisoners who turned out to have no known connection to terrorism.

( Also on POLITICO: Feinstein fact-checks Brennan on Twitter)

Todd pointed in particular to the case of Gul Rahman, who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan and chained to the floor of a CIA “black site” known as the Salt Pit, where he died from exposure to cold temperatures. CIA records quoted in the Senate report say Gul’s detention was a case of mistaken identity.

“Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck?” Cheney said. “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”

Cheney insisted that the program did produce intelligence that saved lives.

“It worked,” he said. “It absolutely did work.”

The former vice president cited as one of the program’s successes the example of an alleged plot to fly airliners into tall buildings on the U.S. West Coast. However, the Senate report says the key information about such a plot actually came from a person not in U.S. custody.

Cheney also criticized the Senate investigation for not interviewing either CIA personnel or detainees.

“The report is seriously flawed,” he said. “They didn’t talk to anybody who knew anything about the program. They didn’t talk to anyone who was in the program.”

“It’s a small report,” the vice president said of the review, whose full report runs to more than 6,000 pages. “It didn’t begin to approach what’s required by way of responsible oversight.”

Appearing on NBC just after Cheney, Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the lack of interviews was due to the fact that a Justice Department criminal investigation was underway during much of the time the Senate probe took place, making it difficult to question CIA personnel involved.

Wyden also disputed Cheney’s claim that the report, which was undertaken by Democratic staffers after the GOP withdrew early on, was a “partisan” document.

“Facts aren’t partisan,” Wyden said. “We reviewed 6 million pages of documents. … There are a mountain of contradictions.”

Follow @politico

Wyden said he was troubled by aspects of a news conference held last week by CIA Director John Brennan.

“John Brennan on Thursday really opened the door to the possibility of torture being used again,” the senator said, referring to the director’s comment that he would “defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.”

Brennan did say at the news conference that he has ruled out using such techniques, which have been banned by President Barack Obama.

“If, in the future, there is some type of challenge that we face here, the Army Field Manual is the established basis to use for interrogations,” Brennan said. “We, CIA, are not in the detention program. We are not contemplating at all getting back into the detention program using any of those EITs.”

A U.S. intelligence official said the Senate panel increased the chances of the harsh techniques being used in the future by not looking at the role officials beyond the CIA played in creating and supervising the program.

“Sen. Wyden puts his finger on something important,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “CIA said it is not getting back in the detention business. But by producing such a flawed study and failing to look at how the whole of government made the decisions to implement the program, they have left the door open to bringing the techniques back under another administration. [The committee] has failed to provide one recommendation for how to prevent this from happening.”

Here are some of Cheney’s central claims and the underlying facts:

— The Justice Department “specifically authorized and OK’d, for example, exactly what we did,” Cheney said.

Legal opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel did authorize the use of the techniques in the “enhanced interrogation” program, but the Senate report says the CIA often ignored restrictions in those memos by applying techniques for lengths of times or in combinations that were never approved.

In addition, some detainees were subjected to tactics never legally approved, such as being threatened with a power drill, a gun or the killing of prisoners’ families.

Brennan said Thursday that some CIA officers used unauthorized techniques that “were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all. And we fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes.”

— Japanese soldiers were prosecuted “for a lot of stuff. Not for waterboarding,” Cheney said. “To draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding judged by our Justice Department not to be torture and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March and the slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the rape of Nanking and all of the other crimes they committed, that’s an outrage. It’s a really cheap shot.”

In fact, at an international tribunal convened in 1946, Japanese soldiers were put on trial for water-torture techniques including waterboarding, with some defendants sentenced to hanging and others to long prison terms.

Whether the CIA’s use of the tactic either as directed by the White House or as carried out in practice was precisely the same as the Japanese is difficult to say, but there’s no doubt such techniques were considered war crimes by the U.S. at one time.

— “[ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi was in the custody of the U.S. military in Iraq in Camp Bucca. He was let go, and now he’s out leading the terror attack against the United States,” Cheney said.

The U.S. did release al-Baghdadi from a U.S.- run facility in Iraq, known as Camp Bucca, in 2009.

The shutdown of the prison was part of a broader U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that then-President George W. Bush set in motion in 2008. It’s possible detainees from Iraq could have been brought to the U.S. for prosecution or detention, but that was considered only rarely by the Obama administration and ultimately not done in Iraq.

— “This man [Bush] knew what we were doing,” Cheney said. “He authorized it; he approved it.”

Details of what Bush knew when remain disputed. He says in his memoir he was well aware of the program and approved using the aggressive techniques. However, former CIA directors Porter Goss and George Tenet have said they never gave Bush a briefing on the program.

The Senate report says that when Bush had a detailed briefing on the program in 2006, a CIA email recounting the briefing reported he was uncomfortable with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”

— “They [Senate investigators] didn’t talk to anybody who knew anything about the program. They didn’t talk to anybody within the program,” Cheney said.

While the Senate Intelligence Committee did not conduct its own interviews, it did review interviews that the CIA’s Office of Inspector General and the CIA historian did with participants in the program.

Senate Democrats say their ability to do interviews was limited because prosecutors in an ongoing Justice Department criminal probe declined to coordinate with the panel. Backers of the report say the contemporaneous accounts of CIA personnel are the best evidence of what occurred, but some participants say they would have talked with Senate investigators if asked.

— “The Senate Committee [was a] partisan operation, no Republicans involved,” Cheney said. “It’s a cheap shot piece of political business that was not bipartisan.”

The ultimate Intelligence Committee report was produced solely by Democratic staffers, and by the time the executive summary emerged publicly last week it had no Republican support on the panel. However, Republicans were involved in the early steps toward the investigation, and one Republican senator — Olympia Snowe of Maine — voted to approve the report last year before she retired from the Senate.

“Study is not only Democrats,” Senate Intelligence Committee member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “14-1 vote in 09 to begin; 9-6 in 12 to approve (w/ GOP Senator Snowe); 11-3 in 2014 to release.”