Cheney Defends CIA: Senate Torture Report 'Full Of Crap,' Bush Knew 'Everything'

Former Vice President Dick Cheney blasted a new Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11 as “full of crap.” Cheney criticized the report as being politically motivated and an affront to the CIA in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, his first televised remarks on the subject since the report’s release earlier this week.

"I think it is a terrible report," Cheney said.“It’s a classic example of what you see too often in Washington, where a group of politicians get together and sort of throw the professionals under the bus.” The Senate Democrats responsible for drafting the report did not interview key subjects and thus the lengthy document was “deeply flawed,” Cheney argued. “We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and prevent a further attack,” he said. “We were successful on both parts.”

The lengthy report by the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed the CIA’s brutal interrogation tactics, which included physical abuse, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and rectal feeding. It also showed that the agency deliberately misled the White House and Congress about its interrogation methods, which were largely ineffective in yielding actionable intelligence.

Cheney rebutted the claim that former President George W. Bush had not been aware of the agency’s interrogation program. “He was in fact an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we moved forward with it,“ he said. “He knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program."

The former vice president had also defended the Bush administration and the CIA prior to the report’s release on Tuesday. The idea that the CIA was a “rogue operation” was “a bunch of hooey,” he said, according to the New York Times. “The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Cheney conceded that he had only read summaries of the report and not the full classified document, which is reportedly more than 6,000 pages in length.