Denouncing the Senate report on CIA as “deeply flawed” and “full of crap”, former US Vice President Dick Cheney has stoutly defended the agency’s controversial interrogation methods bordering on torture, asserting that they have helped the United States “catch the b******s who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11”.
Cheney, regarded as the chief architect of former President George W. Bush’s war on terror, told Fox News that he had no regrets about the tactics used after 9/11, remarking: “I think what needed to be done was done. I think we were perfectly justified in doing it. And I’d do it again in a minute.”
Accusing the Senate Democrats of producing a report driven by political reasons, he went on to say that the CIA deserved “a lot of credit – not the kind of condemnation they received from the Senate Democrats”.
“We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and to prevent a further attack, and we were successful on both fronts,” Cheney said.
When questioned on the report’s contention that the harsh interrogation methods like waterboarding and rectal hydration did not produce results, he retorted: “The report is full of crap, excuse me.”
“We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programmes that were designed to catch the b******s who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it didn’t happen again, and that’s exactly what they did, and they deserve a lot of credit,” he said.
Cheney also refuted the report’s assertions that the White House was kept in the dark about the questionable methods, saying President Bush was kept informed. As he put it, “I think he (Bush) knew everything he wanted to know and needed to know.”
Former CIA chiefs George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden have jointly hit out at the Senate Democrats’ report, terming it a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation -- essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America”.
Fiercely defending the detention and interrogation programme in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, they said the post-9/11 programme was formulated “at a time when we had evidence that al Qaeda was planning a second wave of attacks on the US, we had certain knowledge that bin laden had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists and wanted nuclear weapons, we had reports that nuclear weapons were being smuggled into New York City, we had hard evidence that al Qaeda was trying to manufacture anthrax”.
If the al Qaeda has not managed another attack on the US homeland in the 13 years since 9/11, despite a strong desire to do so, it has been due to the CIA’s aggressive counterterrorism policies and programmes, the former chiefs asserted.