By Eric Bradner
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney called a Senate panel’s report on U.S. interrogation tactics during George W. Bush’s administration is “deeply flawed” and a “terrible piece of work.”
“The report’s full of crap,” he said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday evening.
Bush’s Republican vice president insisted that the Central Intelligence Agency’s rough tactics — which the report said included mock executions, beatings, “rectal rehydration” and feeding, sleep deprivation and more — helped the United States “catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11.”
“It did in fact produce actionable intelligence that was vital in the success of keeping the country safe from further attacks,” he said.
Asked specifically about the rectal rehydration instance detailed in the report, Cheney said: “I don’t know anything about that specific instance — I can’t speak to that.”
He also said he hadn’t actually read the report. Its full 6,000 pages haven’t been released, but a lengthy summary was issued Tuesday. Cheney said he’d “seen parts of it. I read summaries of it.”
Contrary to the report’s conclusion that Bush didn’t know the extent of the CIA’s efforts, Cheney said the President was involved in discussions about the interrogation techniques, and that Bush even pointed out some of those conversations in a book he wrote after leaving office.
He said he has no regrets about the tactics used after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks.
“I think what needed to be done was done,” Cheney said. “I think we were perfectly justified in doing it. And I’d do it again in a minute.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2014 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
