Former Vice President Dick Cheney once more defended the interrogation tactics used by the CIA on detainees after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Sunday.
Critics of the tactics, which were recently detailed in a controversial Senate report, say they should be considered torture and, as they go against American values, they should be regretted. Cheney said in an interview that there is no “moral equivalence” between the actions of terrorists and the interrogation techniques used by the CIA, according to CNN.
[quote text_size=”small” author=”– Dick Cheney” author_title=”Former Vice President”]
With respect to trying to define that as torture, I come back to the proposition torture was what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11… It worked… I would do it again in a minute.
[/quote]
The former vice president also dispelled the report’s findings that then-President George W. Bush was unaware of the techniques being used, saying that he authorized the tactics in full.
The report concluded that 22% of the detainees held at secret CIA facilities were innocent, or did not qualify for being held. In his interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cheney brushed aside the conclusion and said, “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”
Cheney showed little remorse for the prisoners who were found to be wrongfully detained, those who died in the program or those like Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was sent to Afghanistan and sodomized due to mistaken identity, according to the Huffington Post.
When pressed by host Chuck Todd as to whether the practice of “rectal rehydration” was acceptable, Cheney said it was not part of the interrogation program. He said he thought it was done for medical reasons, which has been questioned by medical experts, according to NBC News.
Cheney said the report was “seriously flawed” and conducted in a partisan fashion. The 6,000 page report detailed extreme interrogation techniques, which included stress positions, sleep deprivation and water boarding, used on detainees at secret facilities run by the CIA. The report also found that the techniques were ineffective in getting any unique information.
