I’d do it again to protect Americans, says Cheney
Updated about an hour ago
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Former US VP Dick Cheney.—AP/File
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WASHINGTON: Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, who was associated with the Bush administration which tortured terror suspects, says he will have no problem doing again to protect American’s lives.
“I’d do it again in a minute,” Mr Cheney said at a television show on Sunday, offering an unqualified support to a CIA programme, which the US Senate Intelligence Committee said allowed interrogators to torture prisoners.
Showing no remorse for the brutal interrogation techniques used by the CIA during his time in office, the former vice president said what’s done to the prisoners was no torture.
“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” he said. “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”
The US Senate committee reported last week that dozens of suspects were wrongfully detained, CIA interrogators used brutal methods such as rectal feeding, waterboarding, beating, sleep deprivation, in some cases for more than 100 hours in one session. They also lied to the White House about the results of these interrogations.
A man died while in the programme. Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen was shipped off to Afghanistan and sodomised in a case of mistaken identity.
But Mr Cheney said that the Senate committee should have focused on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US and not on these individual cases.
“Torture to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Centre in New York,” he said.
“I have no problem (with these interrogation techniques) 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,” he said.
Mr Cheney also refused to condemn the CIA’s practice of going beyond the techniques approved by the White House and indulging in brutal methods.
The programme to use torture techniques to coerce information, he said, was right because it worked.
He rejected the Senate report’s claim that President George W. Bush had been misled about the extent of the practices.
“This man knew what we were doing,” he said, outlining daily briefings that included the president, the CIA director and himself. “He authorised it. He approved it.”
The Republican leader, who is still popular among ultra-right wing of his party, said he was more disturbed by the detainees released from Guantanamo and prisons in Iraq — many under his own administration — who have returned to the battlefield.
He cited in particular the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was released from a US prison in Iraq in 2004.
“I’m more concerned with bad guys,” said Mr Cheney.
Published in Dawn December 15th , 2014
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