Former Vice President Dick Cheney said that the the torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee was "full of crap," during an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier on Wednesday.
Cheney claimed that the CIA's torture produced "actionable intelligence" and was necessary to protect the United States after 9/11. Cheney made similar comments to The New York Times during an interview on Tuesday, telling the newspaper that if I had to do it over again, I would do it.” Cheney made that same comment in March 2014, saying "the results speak for themselves" and denying that practices like waterboarding are torture.
"We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it never happened again, and that's exactly what they did. And they deserve a lot of credit, not the kind of condemnation they're receiving from the senate Democrats," Cheney told Fox.
Asked about the report's conclusion that the CIA deliberately misled the White House on the torture program, Cheney said that it was "not true."
While Cheney said that he "didn't know all of the allegations out there," he continued to deny that the program tortured individuals, and that the Bush administration had taken deliberate steps to avoid doing so. Pressed on the committee's finding that interrogators force fed detainees through their anuses, Cheney said that the procedure was not one of the techniques authorized by the program.
"I don't know anything about that specific instance, I can't speak to that," he said. "I guess the question is what are you prepared to do in order to get the truth about future attacks against the United States."
While promoting his book in 2011, Cheney said he has "no regrets" about the use of waterboarding.
Cheney has argued information obtained from waterboarding detainees led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. When CNN host Jake Tapper told Cheney that was a disputed point during a July 2014 interview, Cheney stood firm in his belief in the use of waterboarding.
This story has been updated to include remarks from Cheney's Fox interview.
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