'I'd do it again': Cheney says the US should resume enhanced interrogation techniques
- Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that the US should restart the enhanced interrogation practices used on terror suspects after 9/11.
- "If it were my call I would not discontinue those programs," Cheney told Fox Business, adding that they "worked."
- A redacted executive summary of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, which was released in 2014, concluded that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were ineffective.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that the US should restart the enhanced interrogation practices used on terror suspects after 9/11, adding that Senate should confirm CIA nominee Gina Haspel.
"If it were my call I would not discontinue those programs," Cheney told Fox Business. "I'd have them active and ready to go. And I'd go back and study them and learn."
"I've been very vocal about. I believed in it," Cheney said. "I was heavily involved in getting it set up, and getting the opinion out of the Justice Department on how far we could go. I'm not one of those people who calls it torture. An awful lot of people do, but it wasn't. It was set up in a way that ... was in fact consistent with our fundamental statutes and agreements that were in place. And it worked."
"If it were my call, I'd do it again," Cheney said.
A redacted executive summary of a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was released in 2014, concluded that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were ineffective.
Many human rights groups have also criticized the interrogation program as torture, arguing that it violated Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. The Bush administration argued, at the time, that the detainees were not technically prisoners of war.
Brutal interrogation practices are currently banned under US law, but debate on the issue has re-surfaced during Haspel's confirmation process because she was once involved in the CIA's interrogation program.