As vice president, Dick Cheney was the most enthusiastic sponsor for the brutal CIA interrogation program used on al-Qaida suspects, protesting when President George W. Bush scaled it back in his second term.
Now that a Senate Intelligence Committee report has declared that the CIA's methods, later prohibited, violated American values and produced little or no useful intelligence, Cheney is fiercely defending not just the agency's record, but his own as well.
'I would do it again in a minute,' Cheney said in a spirited, emotional appearance Sunday on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general have agreed with his view.
'Torture is what the al-Qaida terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,' Cheney said in his latest interview defending the CIA program. 'There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.'
THE NBC HOST, Chuck Todd, pressed Cheney on what might constitute torture, reading actual episodes from the Senate report: Holding a prisoner in a coffin-sized box for 11 days? Handcuffing a prisoner's wrists to an overhead bar for 22 hours a day? But Cheney gave no ground.
'I can't tell from that specifically whether it was or not,' he replied.
He even declined to criticize CIA practices used on prisoners called 'rectal feeding' and 'rectal rehydration,' though he noted that 'it was not one of the techniques approved' by the Justice Department.
'I believe it was done for medical reasons,' he said. The Senate report suggests that it was largely used without medical orders to punish prisoners who refused water or food.
IN A SENSE, Cheney is continuing a fight that began inside the Bush administration, defending his own role in the first Bush term against the retreat from the most aggressive methods in the second term.
At 73, nearly three years after a heart transplant, Cheney clearly feels his own legacy is at stake.
In the early months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former President George W. Bush delegated the detailed oversight of the campaign against al-Qaida to his vice president, who embraced the task and urged the harshest measures. Cheney had long believed that restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies after scandals in the late 1970s were ill-advised, and he relished the chance to take the restraints off of the CIA.
Cheney may be running some political risk. For some viewers, his gloves-off comments on 'Meet the Press' may recall his many appearances being interviewed on Sunday morning television shows in late 2002 and early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.
At that time, he repeatedly asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida, claims that turned out to be false. He also made a famously inaccurate prediction on the same show, 'Meet the Press,' on March 16, 2003, that U.S. troops would be 'greeted as liberators.'
BUT THAT experience has not deterred him. In the wake of the Senate report, he has only stepped up his defense of the CIA, deciding that the best defense is a relentless offense.
Cheney was also asked Sunday to answer questions about detainees who had faced lengthy incarceration, and sometimes harsh treatment, even though the CIA concluded they posed no terrorist threat or had been imprisoned by mistake. The Senate report counts at least 26 such 'wrongfully detained' prisoners among the 119 detainees who passed through the CIA secret overseas jails.
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.'
THE SENATE committee's report makes the case that the wrongful detentions and use of torture were actually counterproductive, citing CIA officers' own views that harsh tactics had 'poisoned the well' in questioning some prisoners.
The report's conclusions might have been expected to offer vindication to another Republican stalwart, Sen. John McCain, who has long been the leading voice denouncing torture and countering Cheney on the interrogation question.
But the torture issue has split Congress and the country largely on partisan lines, and McCain's commentary on CBS's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday, where he was asked about Cheney's remarks, underscored how lonely his position has become in the Republican Party.
THE SENATE report was produced solely by the intelligence committee's Democratic staff members, after the Republicans decided to stop participating, and Republicans have almost universally panned it as a biased and flawed study, noting that its authors relied exclusively on documents and did not interview CIA officials.
Unlike nearly every other politician in the debate, McCain has personal experience with the topic: as a downed Navy pilot, he was tortured by his North Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war, an experience that left him with the deep conviction that the United States should never use such tactics. Cheney, by contrast, received four deferments as a student and a fifth as a new father and never served.
McCAIN SAID some defenders of the CIA program are engaging in a 'rewriting of history' and are whitewashing torture. 'You can't claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture,' he said. He noted that waterboarding had a gruesome pre-CIA history dating to the Spanish Inquisition, and that the United States 'tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II.'
'What we need to do is come clean, we move forward and we vow never to do it again,' McCain said. 'I urge everyone to just read the report.'
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