"I'd do it again in a minute," former Vice President Dick Cheney said on "Meet the Press" this morning, asked about the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation techniques and last week's Senate report on torture.
"Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11," he told Chuck Todd. "There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation."
Other "highlights" from his interview:
Asked about rectal feeding:
"What was done here apparently certainly was not one of the techniques that was approved. I believe it was done for medical reasons. … It wasn’t torture... it wasn’t part of the program.”
Asked about President Bush's awareness of the program, in dispute in the Senate report:
"A flat-out lie ... This man knew what we were doing, he authorized it, he approved it."
Asked whether torture works:
"It worked, it absolutely worked ... I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective and our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States."
Asked about the wrongfully detained and tortured:
"I'm more concerned with the bad guys that were released than the few that were innocent."
Asked whether the U.S. techniques would be torture if done to an American soldier:
"He's not likely to be waterboarded, he's likely to have his head cut off. ... Waterboarding, the way we did it, was in fact not torture."
Shares