Dick Cheney says torture report is ‘all a bunch of hooey’

Former Vice President Dick Cheney hasn’t yet read the torture report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he says any criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation of suspects under the Bush administration is “all a bunch of hooey.”

Cheney, who has long been a champion of harsh interrogation tactics used after 9/11, told the New York Times nothing he has heard about the contents of the report changes his mind about the wisdom or effectivness of the interrogation program.

The report from the Senate Intelligence Committee will be the first public accounting of the CIA’s use of what critics call torture on al-Qaida detainees held at “black” sites in Europe and Asia.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Cheney told the New York Times. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. 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.”

He once again reaffirmed there are no regrets, saying it was “the right thing to do, and if I had to do it over again, I would do it.”